


Burst Into Flame

by dixiehellcat



Series: Wordsmith [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Abduction, Anxiety Attacks, BAMF Pepper Potts, BAMF Tony Stark, Canon Divergence - Iron Man 3, Canon-Typical Violence, Extremis, F/M, Female Friendship, Gen, Girl Power, Male-Female Friendship, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Presumed Dead, Team Pepperony, but also girl backstabbing kwim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-04 10:35:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 43,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16345151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dixiehellcat/pseuds/dixiehellcat
Summary: The Wordsmith timeline is up to the Avengers/Iron Man 3 period! Chrissy is a full-fledged member of Team Stark now, but her nose for news has not faltered. It leads her to meetings with superheroes, pursuit of a terrorist warlord, and encounters with mad scientists. What a way to spend your holidays.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome back to the Wordsmith verse! Thanks to everybody who has read parts 1 and 2. Your comments and kudos water my crops and moisturize my skin. hehe :)
> 
> If you have just wandered in, welcome to you too! These stories are pretty much understandable as stand-alones, but you may get confused if you looked at the tags and are expecting the catty bitchy reporter Christine Everhart of the MCU. This ain't her. LOL. To meet my Christine, the first two stories in this cycle, The Placement of Angels and Never in the Past Tense, are recommended reading.

The first time I ever heard of the Avengers was the day my friend Tony almost died. 

I’d been in Washington DC for a week, chasing leads on Laverne O’Day, the notorious Capitol Hill Madam, and her high-octane little black book. The city was aswirl with rumors linking her to everybody from Cabinet secretaries to half the Wizards pro basketball team. At least the latter pursuit scored me locker-room access for an afternoon, plus two courtside passes, which I saved until I could get a certain lieutenant colonel back from overseas.

On my last evening there, I sat on a bench outside the Department of Energy, organizing notes on my brand new StarkPad. It was a prototype, and could do almost anything short of giving me a massage or making coffee. Matter of fact, I bet it could make coffee, given a chance. Being friends with a mad inventor has its perks, pardon the pun.

The tablet also functioned as a phone extension of sorts, though I rarely used it as such; but when a light in the corner flashed with a picture of a familiar redhead beside it, I tapped the screen immediately. “Pepper! How are you, girlfriend? What’s up?”

“Up to my eyebrows in business, as usual,” replied the CEO of Stark Industries. “How about you, Chris? Chasing any hot stories?”

“Always! I’m in DC on the Laverne O’Day beat. It’s, um, interesting.”

“I would imagine,” she said dryly. “That explains it then.”

“Explains what?”

“Why I’m looking right at you about 25 feet away from me.”

Sure enough, when I turned, Pepper Potts was standing at the top of the entryway steps of the building behind me, wiggling her fingers in greeting. I jumped up, got a hug, and we grabbed a cab to the oldest saloon in town for supper and catching up. Pepper had spent the past couple of days taking meetings with various governmental agencies about the arc reactor technology that SI had just taken from experiment to full-on reality. The shiny new tower in lower Manhattan that bore the Stark name was hooked up to one, and was now a beacon of self-sustaining green energy, or as Pepper quoted Tony, “lit up like Christmas, but with more me”.

“Sounds like him,” I agreed with a snort. “Honestly, I’ve been on this O’Day story for weeks and just kept waiting for his name to pop up in the rumor mill. Took ‘em three years, but it looks like the gossip grapevine finally figured out you weren’t sleeping with Tony to get a promotion, and when he says he’s with you, he means it.” Pepper’s answering smile was soft. It looked so much better on her than the tight, sad look of an employee pining after her playboy boss, the way she had looked the morning we first met. “So what kind of trouble has he been getting into lately?”

“Running SI’s R&D division. Getting the Tower’s arc reactor online. And consulting, for some division of the Department of Homeland Security, I think. Don’t know much about them, although their liaison is a very nice man.” We chatted while she worked over her salad and I indulged in some pasta with spicy sausage and veggies. It was delicious, and I wondered if I could coax the recipe out of the chef. “How are you and Rhodey?”

“Fine, though I never get to see enough of him,” I admitted.

Pepper nodded in sympathy, and we chatted the evening away. “How much longer are you here?” she asked as we paid and walked outside.

“Planning to leave in the morning.”

“So am I. Want a ride home? I’m taking my team back to Malibu and meeting Tony there.”

“Absolutely. Your company is much better than anybody I might be stuck next to in coach.”

The next morning, I paused on the top step of Stark Industries’ jet. “Everything all right?” Pepper asked.

“Yeah, just thinking back. The first time I got on this plane, the inside looked more like a flying bachelor pad.” That night nearly five years before, I was interviewing a man whose actions I had abhorred. Years and trials later, he had become a person I was proud to call my friend.

“That’s…accurate,” Pepper chuckled. “Tony would agree.”

We took off, and while Pepper consulted with her employees, Happy Hogan got me some coffee. I made him sit down with his tea and catch me up on everything he’d been up to, which really wasn’t much; but I liked the gentle chauffeur and loved to listen to him chatter about how much in love his bosses were.

After we finished our drinks, Happy decided to go to the back of the plane and nap. I swore he could nap anytime and anyplace, not that that’s a bad thing. I was about to kick my shoes off and relax too, when somebody turned on the TV.

For a horrible few seconds, I thought I was looking at a second terrorist attack on New York City, another 9/11. Then I spied—things—in the air, huge undulating creatures that looked like armored eels. Alongside them flew what appeared to be airborne jet-skis, carrying nasty-looking reptilian beings armed to the teeth. Oh, cool, a sci-fi movie with decent effects, I thought, until I noticed the CNN bug in the corner of the screen.

“What the hell?” one man said. Everyone gathered around, standing and moving closer to the screen. Somebody turned the volume up. News photographers rushed from place to place capturing shaky hand-held footage, while announcers with tremors in their voices tried to explain what was going on. Onscreen, police fired on the creatures, joined as we watched by troops, probably National Guard, I thought. Even the heavy military armament didn’t have much impact, though. Buildings were being destroyed right and left. 

One camera panned up to a hole in the sky—a what?—through which more invaders poured, like insects through a gap in a house’s wall. I glanced out the plane’s window; the sky looked calm, but I expected a sky-eel to slither up and swallow our little vessel whole. That made me mad. If I was going to die in a damn alien invasion, I’d rather go down fighting.

Another camera angle captured crowds of civilians rushing for cover. Several people moved through the panicky throngs calmly, directing them to safety and talking to the civil defenders. When a pack of reptiles dropped onto the broken asphalt, they were met with stunning force by the same small band. A man and woman in dark clothing struck and shot and kicked. “Is that guy shooting _arrows_?” a woman behind me said in disbelief. Why yes, yes he was, and hitting things he wasn’t even looking at. I was impressed. 

A figure in blue dashed into frame, and every one of us gasped, because we all had grown up reading about him. “Captain America??” somebody yelped. “Or some guy in the suit, anyway?”

“It's Captain America.” Pepper’s voice was low, her gaze fixed on the TV as if she knew something the rest of us didn’t. “The Avengers Initiative. It was intended to be a team of—superheroes, I guess, to protect earth. Tony thought it had been discontinued. He said they didn’t want him, or approve him, except as a consultant, but their agent came three nights ago with files. He said personality profiles didn’t matter now, and asked Tony to help, probably to try and prevent this.” Onscreen, the three were joined by a big man dressed like an operatic Viking, with a huge war hammer in his hand, then by a man on a motorcycle, but I was looking for someone else now. I reached for my friend’s hand, and as my fingers closed over hers she let out a low cry. “He’s not supposed to be there…”

My gaze jerked to the TV, where one gigantic flying beast careened down the street toward the fighters, being led a merry chase by a familiar streak of red and gold armor. “I knew it. Oh, SHIT, Tony,” I groaned, then watched in transfixed awe as the motorcyclist morphed into a huge green humanoid, and the two of them brought the behemoth down.

More aliens poured from the hole in the sky. Captain America pointed as if issuing orders, and the group scattered and commenced the most remarkable display of team ass-kicking I had ever seen. We cheered as invaders were blown up and busted up from all directions. Most of the photographers had fled, but a few stood their ground amid the battle. Every couple of minutes Iron Man flew past a camera and I breathed a quick prayer of thanks, knowing he had survived a little longer. 

Behind me, a woman was murmuring the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. My free hand was halfway to my phone to call Rhodey for help, but he was somewhere in Asia with the new suit Tony had built just for him, dubbed War Machine. It was going to kill him if something happened to Tony and he wasn’t here, but there was no way he could get back in time.

Even these Avengers couldn’t hold off the onslaught of attackers forever, and apparently somebody higher up figured the same, because the image onscreen suddenly changed to a shot of a tiny dark speck hurtling toward Manhattan. Don Lemon no longer fought the quaver in his voice when he reported that the US military had fired a missile, a tactical nuke, to stop the invasion.

Angry yells filled the plane, then died to shocked silence when the black speck was intercepted by a bright one. Tony had caught up with the missile; he wobbled around on the screen, trying to do what, I couldn’t tell, until it shot heavenward, toward the hole in the sky. “He’s gonna take it out that wormhole, blow the bastards up! You go, Mr. Stark!” a man cried. The others, faithful SI employees all, set up a whoop, except for Pepper who stood frozen and silent.

On the ledge by her seat, forgotten, her phone buzzed. I was tempted to grab it and swear into it. How dare anybody call her at this instant? My eyes flicked over to it, and irritation morphed into panic when I saw the picture on the tiny screen. I scooped it up and gasped, “Tony?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy meets Tony's new co-workers.

The snarky voice on the other end said, “Okay, cornbread, I realize this is a high stress situation, but I know JARVIS did NOT just dial a wrong number.”

“No! I’m riding home with Pepper, she’s right here, but I didn’t want the call to roll over before she could answer--get your ass back down here, hot rod, right now, or as God is my witness I will—” I choked and thrust the phone at Pepper’s pale face. 

“Tony?” she got out before tears began to pour down her cheeks. “I…I know, baby, I know, I love you too, I always have…I dreamed about you, when you were…Come back here, dammit, you do not get to leave me like this!...I will. Tony, call me when you—Tony? TONY!”

The phone dropped from her hands, and she put them over her face, sobbing. The other people looked away, as though ashamed of their cheers of only seconds before. I wrapped my arms around her, but for once words utterly deserted me. After a few moments, she sniffed, looked over at me and swallowed. “He said, ‘tell Chrissy it was good to hear her voice’,” she whispered.

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I fought for composure. When Tony had been sick and dying, he had told me how glad he was that Pepper had me, a friend who would be strong for her. I had to be that now, no matter the pain I felt. _God, lend me courage_ , I thought, and forced a smile. “I’ll thank him when I see him, for thinking of me.” We both looked back at the TV just in time to see the spot of red and gold and black vanish out the gap in the blue sky. “Maybe it would’ve been better if I hadn’t answered—”

“No! Oh, no, Chris. If I had missed that call, and seen it later, when he di-didn’t come back, I—I couldn’t have stood it. At least this way he…he wasn’t alone. If he had had to go through this all alone, even if—he came back, he might have been broken.”

“True,” I replied. “As hard as it is to get him to talk about some things to begin with, can you imagine him dealing with, like, PTSD?” 

“I think maybe he already is, somewhat,” she said quietly. “I’m still trying to get him to a therapist.”

I prayed she would have the chance to keep trying. We held each other and stared at the TV screen in silence. “Remember that night Rhodey found Tony in Afghanistan?” I said. “When we listened through the hack? Here we are again, on the wrong end of the line, waiting and praying for your crazy boyfriend to come back home safe.” 

The video image was split now; the aliens began to collapse, and the portal to shrink. Tony was nowhere to be seen. I tried not to scream, and stared unblinking at the screen, and tried to blame the water spilling from my eyes on that. Just before the hole vanished, a spark slipped through and plummeted toward earth like a shooting star. The watchers around me yelled in excitement, but I gulped with fear. Pepper tensed. “He’s not slowing down!” she gasped.

Suddenly, the huge green man sprang upward, snatching Tony out of the air. As we watched in disbelief, he grabbed onto the nearest skyscraper to slow their fall, then dropped to the ground. Somehow, the rescuer even managed to twist in mid-air, landing on his back and taking the brunt of the impact. He held Tony close to his chest, before rolling him onto the concrete.

My heart leaped with hope, but the Iron Man suit lay too still as the other Avengers rushed over. Big green let out a roar. When Tony finally moved, the plane erupted in whoops of victory. I shrieked. Pepper went limp and muttered, “That man is going to be the death of me.” After a few more breaths, she pulled out her own StarkPad. “Let me get into the navigation system and turn this plane around—no, wait, Chrissy, you need to be—”

“I need to be where the news is,” I said with a grin, “which right now, is most likely where you’re planning to go. Besides, my friend, to paraphrase a great old Southern rock song, I’m on this train with you till it runs out of track.”

The jet put down at the first available airport. Pepper had a brief disagreement with her team; she wanted to send them on to California, but they didn’t want to leave her behind. I had already made my feelings on the subject clear, so she relented and buttonholed the nearest staff to escort her people to a lounge to rest while Happy commandeered a car from who knew where. “You should stay here with them,” she told me.

“And report on what, then?” I retorted. “I need to see with my own eyes before I can write about it. You don’t need to wander around a damn war zone with nobody but Happy there, either.”

For a moment, Pepper waffled, then sighed. “I didn’t want to ask you, but…I really didn’t want to go alone. It’s not like you’re going to go all superhero and protect me, I know, but—”

“Well, you know, I am pretty tough with a corn dog skewer in my hand.” That earned a small laugh. “I get it. Some things are just easier with a friend, right? I admit, I’ll feel better when I see Tony, too. I might even score a quote from the Avengers if they’re still around.”

That hope seemed unlikely until Pepper got Tony on the phone as we rode. Whatever he told her made her jaw drop. “They’re eating,” she said in disbelief. “They actually found a place in midtown that stayed open, and they went in and ordered a meal.”

“Looked to me like they deserved it.” I started making notes for what was going to be a blockbuster article. 

Following Pepper’s directions, Happy navigated through wreckage that grew increasingly graphic. It felt like a war zone, all right. Police stopped us twice, but Pepper talked us through. When we got close enough to see Stark Tower, I winced at the obvious damage it had taken; the name on the side was almost completely obliterated. First responders hustled around seeing to the injured, while National Guard troops hauled off dead aliens. 

Happy finally stopped the car as close as he could get to a small Middle Eastern joint, remarkable only for a bike stand out front and a man dressed in ornate robes sitting on the sidewalk next to it. Pepper and I got out of the car and started toward the restaurant, stepping over chunks of concrete and burnt spots that still smoked. We angled toward the man to see if he needed help, till he turned toward us. I froze and put an arm out to halt my friend. “He’s gagged, and cuffed to the bike stand,” I pointed out in a low voice. 

Pepper’s eyes widened. “Good indicator he’s not on our side,” she responded in kind. 

I nodded. “I could cheerfully stomp a mudhole in his ass on several counts, then.” The man’s green eyes had glittered with fury, but at my words they locked with mine and looked almost amused. His gaze pierced, and despite my anger, it took an effort to look away. I sighed in mock disappointment. “And he’s kinda handsome too.” He really was, with long black hair and a lean muscular frame. “Damn shame for good looks to be wasted on bad guys.”

Pepper snorted and elbowed me, just as the restaurant door opened and a group of people peered out through the dusty air at us. _Bet they’re wondering who the fuck is dumb enough to be out running around in this mess_ , I thought. Then I spied the blue uniform of Captain America and pieced things together, at the same moment Pepper caught her breath and pushed past me. Tony shoved through the group and rushed to meet her. As they embraced, I smiled and deliberately turned away. Let other people stare, if they wanted to be so rude. Instead, I stepped aside and slowly rotated, taking in the surreal spectacle and dictating softly into my recorder app, searching for words to describe the feeling of standing where an invasion of the earth had been thwarted.

As I turned, I could hear Pepper murmur, “I’m so glad you didn’t die.” I saw Tony had sat down on the remains of a newspaper stand, with his hands on Pepper’s hips and his face pressed against her bosom. 

“Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t die too. I really would’ve missed these,” he replied, his voice slightly muffled. She popped him lightly on top of his head. “Ow. Uncalled-for, Potts. I saved the city, remember, maybe the world, would it injure you to show some respect…”

I grinned fondly at his babble and the look of sheer relief on Pepper’s face. My friends would be fine for now. As I suspected, the rest of the Avengers were in fact staring at the two, as if they’d never seen lovers parted by peril reunite.

“Um, miss?” A slight turn farther brought me face to face with the blue suit from every history book of the past seventy years. The man inside it filled it out quite nicely, which was definitely _not_ mentioned in my history book, nor were the pink cheeks, blond hair, or bright blue eyes. 

With a quick move, I dropped my phone in my pocket and pulled on professional mode like a raincoat. “Hi! I’m being terribly rude, aren’t I? I’m Christine Everhart, I write for Vanity Fair magazine and I’m a friend of Pepper and Tony’s.” Briefly I explained how and why I was there. “What you did here was amazing to watch. So you all are the, Avengers, I think Pepper said? And you’re—”

“Steve,” he said quickly, “Steve Rogers. Um, Captain America.” 

I put out a hand and he looked a bit taken aback for a second. “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess women—ladies—didn’t shake hands, back in the ‘40s.”

“No, it’s okay. I’m—still getting used to things.” His big hand enveloped mine, before he was displaced by an even larger form.

“Greetings, milady! I am Thor, prince of Asgard. You are a—a journalist, you say? Friend Banner here tells me your work is like that of the bards of my home world, then. I assure you, there are enough heroic tales from this day to keep you busy for years to come!” He kissed my hand—kissed my freaking hand—then gestured with his hammer toward the prisoner by the bike stand. “Yon villain is, I am shamed to admit, my brother Loki, who led the Chitauri against your realm. The muffler he bears prevents him from speaking to wield his magic.” Magic, huh? That bore pursuit, one of these days. They didn’t look at all like brothers, but apparently they were aliens, so there was a whole non-human genetic field to consider, too. Heck, who knew, maybe one of them was adopted. 

The friend Thor had indicated was the motorcyclist we had seen, dressed in ill-fitting clothes he had probably scrounged after his exploits in his other form. “You!” I yelped happily. “You’re big green!”

“Um, well, yeah, actually, people call him the Hulk. My name’s Bruce Banner.” He scratched at his curly dark hair full of dust, and was so adorable and shy I could have eaten him up with a spoon. 

I settled for giving him a big hug that made him squeak in surprise. “That was incredible the way you jumped up those buildings,” I told him. “Thank you so much for saving Tony. Pepper would have died if anything had happened to him, and as long as he and I have been friends, I’d probably have been not far behind her.”

Two other people hovered in the background, the man and woman in black whose skills at alien-busting we had admired on the plane. They were talking in low tones, either ignoring us, or trying to be ignored. I chose not to take it personally. Despite being currently taken, though, I had to note the archer, a dirty blond with long legs and an excellent backside, was well worth more than one look. Then he shifted enough for me to get a good look at his companion. “Natalie?” came out of my mouth before I could even try to slow it down.

“Aw, Nat, no,” the archer muttered, but stepped aside for the redhaired woman to stalk toward me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The great old Southern rock song Chrissy quotes is Can't You See by the Marshall Tucker Band, in her line to Pepper about the train. It's also a bit of an allusion to another iconic MCU quote, said between another famous pair of friends whose relationship will become increasingly important as our story continues. :)
> 
> My idea of where Loki was during the shawarma scene was inspired by this hilarious piece of fanart: https://geektyrant.com/news/2012/6/14/where-was-loki-while-the-avengers-were-eating-shawarma.html
> 
> ETA, per requests, here is the entire phone conversation between Tony and Pepper. <3
> 
> (Pepper takes the phone from Chrissy) “Tony? I—"  
> “Pepper? Pepper, listen, I love you, I’ve loved you for so long—”  
> “I know, baby, I know, I love you too, I always have--”  
> “When I was in Afghanistan, I thought of you, I’d think I heard your voice sometimes--”  
> “I dreamed about you, when you were--”  
> (Tony is talking over Pepper) "--and I was so damn stupid I never could figure out why, but it was because I loved you, all along—I can’t go without being sure you know, please, don’t forget me, I mean, be happy, but--”  
> “Come back here, dammit, you do not get to leave me like this!”  
> “I’ll try. This looks like a one way trip, honey, but I swear I’ll try. Tell Chrissy it was good to hear her voice?”  
> “I will. Tony, call me when you--" (connection is lost) "Tony? TONY!”
> 
> We will learn more about the dream Pepper refers to, later.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few choice words from Chrissy to the Avengers, and a couple of happy reunions.

“Natasha, actually.” The flaming redhead I had known as Natalie Rushman, briefly Tony’s assistant, looked every inch a killer now, her eyes wary when they met mine.

“Wow,” I returned. “Well, it’s nice to see you again. The last I saw of you, you were haring off after Ivan Vanko. I worried until Pepper heard you were all right, but she never said you were a, a superhero.”

A hint of surprise crossed her face, followed by a small smile, as I spoke. “Hardly that. When Stark came out as Iron Man it got him on certain agencies’ radar. I was sent to help and keep an eye on him.”

The thought of a spy watching Tony didn’t thrill me, but I had a sudden thought. “Do you work with a one-eyed man?” That got me the instant attention of all the Avengers, and I included them all in my quick explanation of my encounter near Tony’s house three years before. Natasha didn’t answer my question directly, but she didn’t have to. “I wondered at the time how he knew who I was, but it makes sense now. You knew me too when we first met, now that I think about it.”

“Fury knows much,” Thor rumbled.

Natasha made a sharp almost-hiss in his direction. “We don’t need to talk about some things in front of civilians,” she said with a jerk of her head toward me. “She _is_ a reporter.”

“ _And_ she’s close to Stark,” Rogers added.

I stiffened. Being talked about like I wasn’t there was bad enough, but that happens to reporters sometimes. How, though, was being Tony’s friend somehow a singular security risk to these people? In my head I heard Pepper’s anguished words, and I spoke them, very quietly. “Tony wasn’t even supposed to be here, I understand. You didn’t _want_ him, didn’t _approve_ him. And he just responded by nearly dying to save your asses, our asses, this city, and probably the planet.” 

I looked around. Rogers, Thor and Banner all looked stunned; then the Asgardian nodded slowly as I went on, and big green’s alter ego more enthusiastically. Natasha’s face was cool and composed, but behind her, the archer’s eyebrows went up. I should have let it go then, probably, but sometimes the words take me over. “Do you remember,” I asked Natasha, “what I told you in Monaco, when you asked me what Tony was like?” I glanced over my shoulder. Pepper, in her perfectly professional suit, with her face blotchy and her eyes red from crying, was holding onto Tony like her life depended on it. “I guess you just had a demonstration of how right I was, at least on one count. He really is as brave as anybody I’ve—no, wait, I take that back now. He's _the_ bravest person I’ve ever known.” Silence reigned except for the noises of the wrecked city around us. I swept them with another look; they deserved respect for their heroism, yes, but I was not having any shit from them toward me or my friends.

One of said friends decided to break that moment, as only he could. “Potts,” Tony pretended to scold, coming toward me. “The dust hasn’t even settled, and you’re already running press junkets?”

After several years, my eyes had gotten so they rolled on their own sometimes at him. “Pipe down, Otis,” I mock-grumbled. but my relieved smile and my own wet eyes gave the lie to the snark as much as the embrace I caught him up in as I turned and met him halfway. “Thank God you’re okay,” I breathed against his shoulder, arranging myself carefully to not press against the arc reactor in his chest but still give good hug.

He tensed. “PDA, cornbread?”

I knew what he meant; I had worked almost as hard to keep our friendship discreet as I had to get him to tolerate my touchy-feely nature. Though if I was honest, I suspected he did more than tolerate me now. “DGAF, hot rod.”

Tony let out a “Ha!” and his arms wrapped around me in return. “Didn’t know if it mattered to you that Captain America is giving us the stink-eye.”

I pulled back just far enough to meet his eyes. “Look at me, Tony Stark. Do I really look like I give a rat’s ass what Captain America thinks?” A quick peek told me, sure enough, Steve Rogers was blinking at us in genuine perplexity. “Lord, did friends not hug back in the day?”

“They probably crossed swords or something.”

“Oh, you had to make it weird.” I sighed in amusement, squeezed him once more and stepped back.

“Not weird. And you’re starting to sound like Rhodey. Definitely been hanging with him too much.”

“Duh. Anyway, I’m much more interested in you not getting yourself almost killed on national television anymore, okay?”

“Okay, okay. Pep already threatened me. If I get myself killed, she’s going to find some witch to resurrect me so she can kill me again herself, and if anybody could do that it would be her, especially since you’d probably be right beside her conducting interviews and vetting candidates.”

“Damn right she would,” Pepper put in as she came over from introducing herself to the Avengers, and likely putting a little of the fear of God in them. Well, the fear of her, anyway, which is only slightly less scary.

Pepper and I started back toward the car where Happy waited. The Avengers talked among themselves, and Tony said something about having promised Loki a drink. _Of course he would promise an evil mage a drink_ , I thought.

All activity ceased when the roar of repulsors sounded over our heads. With Iron Man standing not twenty feet away, that sound meant only one thing. “Speak of the angels and they flutter their wings,” I hollered as the War Machine suit landed.

“I’m flattered, baby girl, but I wouldn’t go that far.” The face mask popped up and James Rhodes’ smile beamed out, not daunted in the least by the startled raising of weapons from the group of heroes. 

“I would,” I said and bounced over for a kiss. If I thought the Avengers had looked baffled before, by now they were downright bumfuzzled. 

“Sorry I’m late, Tones,” Rhodey called after pecking my lips with his. “Halfway around the world, remember.”

“Not to worry, platypus,” Tony retorted with a big grin. “I got you a to-go box.” 

Quick introductions were made; it turned out Tony had called Rhodey to come help, but he had been in Hong Kong. “I got a lead on Ten Rings,” Rhodey told me. 

I suppressed a snarl. “Good. Whack ‘em an extra time for me. And a few dozen for Pepper?”

“Already got her on the schedule.”

“You sound suddenly bloodthirsty, for a girl reporter,” Bruce Banner commented. He didn’t mean it unkindly, I could tell, from the uncertain half-smile that accompanied the words.

“When a bunch of thugs kidnap, torture and try to kill one of your best friends, a body gets that way,” I replied evenly. Meaningful looks were exchanged between Natasha and the archer; the ease between them said they had been friends or lovers or something for a long time, so perhaps they had actually been in that position.

“You staying in town?” Rhodey asked me. “I’ve gotta go report in, and get out of the can here, but we can meet for dinner and catch up.”

Rogers’ fair face sprouted a disapproving frown. “No disrespect, Colonel, but do you usually share classified intel with press without authorization?”

I was just about done with Captain America already. I gave him a ‘really, you’re going there?’ look, then registered the same look on Rhodey’s face. Out the corner of my eye, I noted Tony and Pepper frozen and staring at Rogers in disbelief. Even Happy looked appalled. I loved it when my friends had my back. “We have an understanding,” I said in a mild tone. “I have sense enough to know what can see print and what can’t. Ask your boss, Captain Rogers; as your friend from Asgard said, he knows a lot.” 

That pretty much stuck a cork in anything else the man might have said. While the Avengers shuffled around and finalized plans, I took another look at my surroundings, and casually checked to be sure the recorder app on my phone was still running. None of my conversations were intended for publication, but you never knew when you might need documentation. The sounds of sirens and cleaning and busyness surrounded us. Like a sturdy little tree after a storm, the small diner stood with open doors, whiffs of mouth-watering scents wafting out the door. _Mmm, smells like shawarma spices_ , I thought. _I should learn to make that, it can’t be that hard…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case the acronyms Tony and Chrissy use need translating:  
> PDA, public display of affection (which Chrissy usually goes out of her way to avoid with Tony at this point)  
> DGAF, don’t give a fuck (which is how she feels at this moment, because she is too darn glad Tony is alive)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An unexpected incident in the kitchen exposes a secret Tony's been hiding.

Shawarma wasn’t that hard to make, as it happened. Once I found a good recipe, I made it frequently. A list of the needed spices went, with other directions and compilations of ingredients, into a small ragged purple spiral notebook I had kept since college.

I love to cook. It’s a great stress release for me, but I couldn’t do much in the tiny kitchen of my apartment. When Pepper and I first became friends, while Tony was missing in Afghanistan, I had cooked at least once a week at his mansion for her and myself. That had ended when Tony returned, partly because of the close guard he put on his space and his inner circle, partly because of my need to maintain my objectivity as a reporter. 

After I’d gotten entangled in Justin Hammer’s plot to bring down Stark Industries, and Ivan Vanko’s plan to destroy Tony, things had shifted. My ongoing closeness with Pepper aside, I guess it was, as much as anything, my insistence on reaching out to Tony, my concern for his well-being and my willingness to help, that had moved my status with him from professional ally to personal friend. It didn’t hurt that I had come out of that mess dating his best buddy, either.

Anyway, the upshot was that every couple of weeks, I went over and renewed my love affair with Tony’s kitchen. Getting us all together became even easier when Pepper finally moved into the mansion, of course. Sometimes it was elaborate, other times more down-home. The night I made a full-on country breakfast for supper, complete with scratch biscuits, country ham and red-eye gravy, Tony had proposed to me, which was great, except we didn’t live in Utah and neither Pepper nor Rhodey liked to share.

So it was that, some months after I met the Avengers in the aftermath of what we in the press came to call the Battle of New York, I was puttering around the Malibu house getting my _mise en place_ set up for a special dinner. (Translated, I was getting my ingredients and pans and things together.) It was late fall, not that you could tell from the weather. California is lovely, but sometimes I did miss living in a place that had seasons. 

While I started oil warming in a skillet, I talked through the recipe, as I had done ever since Tony had connected his AI JARVIS to fully function throughout the house. I had quickly found JARVIS was not a voice spouting canned responses. He had a sly sense of humor both like and unlike his creator. Tony had made him capable of interacting and learning, and he loved to learn! Every time I came over to cook, JARVIS trained his metaphorical eyes and ears on me and I taught him new dishes, in hopes he could later help Pepper to prepare them (and maybe even Tony, though that was probably too much to expect).

“I always heard cooking was like science, but it looks like you’re about to build an atom bomb in here,” Tony cracked as he walked in. 

“It is like science. Sometimes it’s careful measuring and timing and being exacting, sometimes you throw a bunch of leftovers in a bowl and see what happens.”

“I have spare protective gear if you need it.”

“Nope, not using that much cayenne, since Rhodey isn’t here,” I grinned, putting some rice and quinoa blend in a pan of water on a back burner to cook. “JARVIS, would you time this for 20 minutes, please?”

“Of course, Miss Everhart,” replied the always calm British-tinged voice.

“Thanks, hon.” I pulled my zip bag full of marinaded bird out of the fridge.

“Yeah, that Cajun stuff you cooked last time melted honey bear’s eyeballs.” Tony perched on a stool at the kitchen island. “But he kept right on shoveling it in!”

“Spice can be addictive,” I told him, “Also, anything is better than military base food.”

Tony shuddered dramatically in a way that told me he had eaten that bland crap at some point in his sordid past. Then he watched me closely while I squished the meat and bright red seasoning blend around in the sealed bag. “Seriously, does it always take this much—stuff—to cook a meal?”

“Depending on what’s being cooked,” I chuckled. “I’m not laughing at you, it’s just obvious you haven’t had much experience. Which is a shame, I bet you'd be great in a kitchen if you ever wanted to give it a try.”

“I doubt it. Took me three hours to make Pepper an omelet once. But when I was little I’d sneak into the kitchen when I could, and watch. Jarvis, the original one I mean, was an incredible cook.”

“No wonder his namesake enjoys listening to me ramble on about it.” I loved that Tony had named his artificial intelligence after the butler who had half raised him. After I opened the zip bag and took a deep appreciative sniff of the mingled spices, I set it on the island and turned back to the stove to see if the skillet was warm enough.

“Um, what is this?” Tony leaned over the bag, poked at it, and wrinkled his nose, his face suddenly uncertain.

“Don’t let the color scare you. A little smoked paprika makes stuff look raging red like your newest suit. It’s not super hot, I swear.” The skillet was almost ready. I stirred the grain and went to look for the Greek yogurt to make the sauce to go on the side. “It’s chicken shawarma. It smelled so good that time I met you and the Avengers in New York I had to learn how to cook it. I just baked the chicken, cut it up, made a paste of seasonings with some lemon juice and olive oil, tossed them all together and bagged them up overnight to get better acquainted—”

“Oh. Um, that’s great. I know you and Pep will enjoy it, but my, uh, stomach’s kind of, kind of delicate right now, and, ah, I don’t have much appetite, it just caught a red-eye to parts unknown, so I’m gonna—go down to the shop, yeah, that’s…”

“Don’t start, mister, I heard your stomach growl not two minutes ago.” From my position with my head stuck in the fridge I heard the stool scrape across the kitchen floor, then suddenly heard a thump, then another harder one, and a choked-off gasp. When I straightened and looked around, I didn’t see Tony, but heard something shuffling on the other side of the counter. I stepped over, then gulped. The stool was overturned, and Tony lay in a heap on the tile floor. He wasn’t flailing around and loudly complaining, so I guessed the only thing hurt would be his ego. I squatted beside him, already shifting into ‘mildly exasperated but mostly amused’ mode. “You were trying to balance the stool on one leg again, weren’t you—”

_“They’re coming._ ” The hoarse voice hardly sounded like Tony. His eyes were screwed shut and his hands clenched on his t-shirt. “So many…’s dark…can’t breathe…” He curled into a tight ball, and started to quiver all over and pant.

It could have been half a dozen things, but my brain connected the dots and recognized the situation almost before I was consciously aware. This was something I had handled before, I was sure of it, though not in a long time. I dropped to the floor to sit. “Tony, can you hear me? It’s Chrissy, it’s all right, you’re home. Listen to me. Breathe with me. In for four, out for four.” I began to count, but he didn’t follow. “Hey hot rod, c’mon, look up here.” He jerked as if startled; his eyes fluttered open and he squinted up at me with a confused and frightened look. “There you go,” I soothed. “Let’s breathe now, okay?” His eyes widened, and when I tilted my head they locked onto mine. This time when I started the sequence again, he joined in. “Good, that’s good. You’re safe hon, nobody’s gonna hurt you. I know you’re scared, but I’m right here, Pepper’s here, and JARVIS, and we won’t let anything bad happen to you, I promise—eek. JARVIS, turn the stove off please?”

“Done, Miss Everhart. Shall I call Miss Potts?”

“No!” Tony gasped, sounding a little more like himself now. “Don’t, J. Just…gimme a minute.”

He started to push himself up. I put my hands out. “Can I touch you, Tony? Is that okay? Will that—” 

I couldn’t finish before he grabbed my hands in an almost painfully tight grip and pulled himself up. After a minute, he sat with his back against the side of the island, tipped his head back and closed his eyes again while my thumbs rubbed firm gentle strokes on the backs of his hands. “What the hell was that?” he said shakily.

“If I had to make a guess, I’d say—”

“What’s going on?” Pepper’s alarmed voice was a welcome sound. “Tony? Chrissy?”

I looked over in relief as she crouched in front of him. “Hey. I think he just had an anxiety attack.”

“A what?” Tony had recovered enough to scoff. “Felt more like a heart attack! Frankly I’d prefer that.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” I retorted, “because nobody ever died from an anxiety attack. Trust me, I've looked it up. My mom had them, I coached her through a lot of them.” He pulled his hands from mine, rubbed his face, then let them drop at his sides as though exhausted, which he probably was. “Any idea what brought it on? It could be anything, something that meant nothing to me but triggered something in you.”

“I think it was—” Tony broke off, hesitated for a long moment, then shook his head. 

“Tony.” Pepper said warningly as we helped him stand up. I righted the stool and slid it under his butt. “If you don’t tell us, we can’t make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

He sat down, still a little unsteady, and wrapped his arms around Pepper’s waist while she stroked his hair. It reminded me of the way they had greeted each other in New York, after—

New York. The aliens. The wormhole. _The shawarma._

“Fuck me sideways,” I snarled to myself, as I grabbed the zip bag, sealed it and tossed it onto the farthest-away counter space I could hit. “It was the chicken, wasn’t it, Tony? The smell of the spices?”

He didn’t move at first, but after another tremulous breath, he nodded. “Think so,” he mumbled. Pepper hugged him tightly and murmured to him.

Now I had to take a few deep breaths, to deal with the realization that I had caused this, had sent my brave, strong friend into a tailspin of fear. “I…okay…Pep, you want me to clean up here before I leave, or just go on and go?”

Pepper’s eyes flicked over to me and she frowned. Before she could answer, though, Tony grumbled, “Thought we were eating supper. I’m starving and scotch isn’t gonna cut it.” He sat up and gave me what I teasingly called his Bambi look, huge liquid brown eyes taking up just about all of his face. “We can call out for pizza, or Thai or whatever. I tip well enough that anybody will deliver anything out here.” I must have looked as distraught as I felt, because Pepper reached out just then and drew me toward them. With one arm around her, I raised my other hand in Tony’s direction, then halted, unsure whether touching would be welcome just now. Tony gave me his own version of the fondly exasperated look. “C’mere,” he said and pulled me to his side. “You’re the one that keeps throwing science out to justify fondling me. Serotonin, oxytocin, whatever else you said hugs trigger that’s good for your health.”

Guilty feelings weren’t easy to let go of. “I’m sorry, Tony,” I managed. “I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know. You know I wouldn’t ever do anything to bring up bad memories or hurt you on purpose.”

“Hush your mouth. Did I get that right?” Tony’s attempt to sound Southern made me giggle now instead of wanting to cringe and hide. “Wasn’t your fault.” He squeezed me and then started trying to disentangle himself from female arms. “Okay, group grope over. Food.”

“Don’t order out unless you want to. I can overhaul the chicken, no problem,” I told them. “If you had a bell pepper, I’d do fajitas. Or, hm, maybe a big pot of chicken and rice soup? I’d bake a loaf of beer bread to go with it, but it takes an hour, that’s too long…” I opened one cabinet and perused my selection of seasonings. “Oooh! Turkish chicken, how’s that sound?” I grabbed the jar in question, then retrieved my bag of bird and dumped it all into a large mixing bowl under running water, to run off the smell and rinse off every trace of the shawarma paste. “Just sing out. Whatever melts y’all’s butter suits me.”

Getting no reply, I looked around. Tony was staring at the open cabinet full of stacks of little jars of Penzey’s spices with a bewildered air. “Potts…when did we hire a chef?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This verse changes canon here a bit, of course (like, everything else I’ve written so far didn’t. LOL.) The anxiety attack Tony has out at the restaurant with Rhodey is now not his first one (although I've always suspected it wasn't anyway; it was just the first time it happened in public, or indeed, maybe the first one in front of anybody else), nor the first time Tony is told what is happening to him.
> 
> All kinds of weird things can trigger anxiety attacks, and of all our senses, smell is the only one that fires directly into the brain with no mediation, so it made sense that smelling something he associated with New York could easily throw Tony into an attack before he even knew anything was happening. 
> 
> Oh, and if you are interested, here's my go-to shawarma recipe! https://www.recipetineats.com/chicken-sharwama-middle-eastern/  
> And Penzey's, which has the best spices ever. https://www.penzeys.com/


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy's pursuit of the Mandarin story brings her into conflict with her publisher and readers, and into the middle of an apparent terrorist attack.

JARVIS assured me he had recorded the whole incident. Pepper watched it, discreetly, until she felt confident she could talk Tony through any future attacks. In fact, JARVIS himself, Pepper told me, opined that if a human wasn’t available, he could at the very least verbally reassure his Sir and coach him through the breathing exercises.

Tony wasn’t helping matters, though. He still stubbornly insisted he could not possibly have had an anxiety attack. He was Tony fucking Stark, after all. “He’s going to Tony-fucking-Stark his ass right into the hospital,” I griped on the phone to Pep one night after she had gone around with him yet again. “Considering his heart and the arc reactor, those spells need to be brought under control. Mom’s doctor got hers straight with the right medication and some chats with a psychologist, and it didn’t take all that long. Anxiety attacks are a physical illness, anyway. It’s like diabetes. Would he think he could bull through that without insulin? Never mind, knowing him he just might. Grrr!”

"He says nothing’s been the same since New York,” Pepper replied. “It’s whatever he saw, when he went through that wormhole…he hasn’t told me much, except some huge armada of alien ships; but it scared him, Chrissy, scared him enough that he’s hardly sleeping. He’s in the workshop around the clock, building one suit after another, trying to figure out a way to protect us.” 

“I could write an anonymous op-ed and call it ‘News Flash: Tony Stark Is Not Responsible for the Entire Damn World’,” I offered, only half kidding.

Pepper snorted ruefully. “When he does sleep, he has nightmares. I asked him if that was new. I’d bet it’s not, but you know him, sometimes you need a crowbar to pry a straight answer out of him. Last night he was having one; I managed to wake him up and then we heard a noise out in the hallway—it was one of his suits.” I gasped out loud and she let out a shaky half-giggle. “I’m laughing now, but it scared both of us half to death. He’s got these sensors, you know, implanted under his skin now, to call the suit, and he said it must have picked up physical signs of distress when he was dreaming. So he’s locked himself in the workshop right now, recalibrating those.”

“He’d better! Imagine if you’d woken up and found that sucker looming over you!”

“Thank you very much for _that_ lovely mental image,” she retorted. “He swears he’d be worse if he hadn’t been able to talk to me, on the phone when he was carrying that missile. I don’t know…I think this has probably been going on since Afghanistan, just, nobody knew it because…”

“Because he was alone at home then,” I finished for her. “A psychologist could help him with that too. Keep trying, Pep. You know you’re one of the only people he listens to. If you’ve had any similar experiences, maybe if you share those it’d get him to open up.”

“I’ve never been prone to nightmares. When I get home from work, I’m so tired I fall into bed and don’t remember anything till morning, usually.” There was a long pause, punctuated with a soft _hmm_ that said my friend was thinking. “There was one night, when Tony was in Afghanistan. I dreamed I was on the beach below the house. It was night, overcast and really dark, no moon or stars. The sky was closing in, so heavy I felt like I was underground. Lightning was striking the ocean’s surface, sending sparks up. I looked out and saw Tony in the water…he was struggling, drowning, yelling 'Pepper, Pepper', but he couldn’t get to shore—it was as if he was being held down, and I couldn’t reach him, and I woke up screaming his name.”

All I could say was, “Whoa. That sounds intense, hon. But, yeah, hearing that, if you’re comfortable sharing it, would at least remind him he’s not alone.” I puffed out a breath and got off my love seat after a short resumption of our typical girl talk. “I have to get going. I’m stuck on this article I’m on, and I’m in trouble with work as it is.”

“What’s their problem? Still the Mandarin thing?”

“Yep.” I was taking heat for a piece I’d written for Vanity Fair’s web site about the notorious terrorist boss who had been hijacking news broadcasts for weeks. The main issue people had with the article was my pointing out the simple fact that the Ten Rings’ leader had valid grievances, even though he was going about addressing them all wrong. Nobody seemed to understand that you could understand someone’s motives and still hate their actions. It’s wasn’t as if I was arguing that ambushing native women and children, or covering up environmental disasters, was right, any more than blowing up innocent civilians on a military base was. 

As Rhodey said some days later, though, “Ain’t nobody tryin’ to hear that, Chrissy.” 

“I know,” I sighed. We were walking around my favorite shopping area in LA. For most of our day together, we had managed to stay off heavy topics. Rhodey had continued chasing down Ten Rings cells all over the world, in his suit now repainted and renamed Iron Patriot, so he wanted and needed a mental vacation. Though I had offered all kinds of options, he said helping me scare up Christmas presents for my family back in Tennessee and my friends and acquaintances here sounded like good mindless activity. (I did not make him carry my packages.) Inevitably, however, we circled back to the shadow figure driving us both. “I keep putting out public requests for the Mandarin to contact me, about a confidential one on one interview. No reply, so far.”

“If you ever hear from the bastard, I’m going with you, and no, baby girl, do not argue with me. I’ll wear a suit, maybe find a costume store and spring for an Afro wig. Give me enough advance notice, I’ll grow a mustache, end up lookin’ like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.” Over my helpless laughter, he went on more seriously, “I don’t know why you want to get in a room with that son of a bitch.”

“Well, I caught some grief for being too positive writing about Tony, so I have to bend over backwards now to be perceived as balanced in writing about people I have beef with. And you get the best info straight from the horse’s mouth. I want to see the guy, take his measure, as my daddy used to say. Maybe find out if I can stand face to face with him and still be fair, not want to bust his ass up for hurting so many people, for hurting Tony…He’s still hurting, Rhodey. It’s worse since the mess in New York with the aliens, but it started in that cave in Afghanistan.” 

“I haven’t told Pep this,” Rhodey began hesitantly while we walked back to his car. “I don’t know if Tony would want her to know, but the other day I met up with him, down at Neptune’s Net. He wanted to help with the Mandarin attacks but I warned him off; the military needs to handle it, not superheroes. Anyway, some kids came up for autographs and started asking him questions about New York, and he—kind of freaked. Ran out, called the suit, was down for a minute, then took off.”

He clearly did not expect the matter-of-fact response he got from me. “Huh. Yeah, sounds like another anxiety attack. Wish he’d go see a doctor about that, damn his hide.” At his open-mouthed look, I quickly recounted the kitchen incident, and Pepper’s reports since then.

“Not surprised,” he commented as we drove through the evening. “That it’s happening, or that he won’t get help. I’ve known too many people with PTSD, and almost all of them go through some denial. For Tony, that ol’ Egyptian river is gonna be more like an ocean.”

I agreed, hoping he might listen to Rhodey, but then we let the topic go while we debated supper. Rhodey actually looked slightly embarrassed when he confessed he had been craving a Guinness bacon cheeseburger from the Hard Rock for weeks. Meeting no shame from me, he pointed the car that way, and we were working our way up Hollywood Boulevard when the pavement vibrated, hard. My mouth was open to say something about construction when I saw Rhodey’s expression change with the suddenness of a switch flipped. “Not construction?” I said instead.

“Not construction,” he replied in clipped tones and nodded ahead of us. People were running down the street from the general direction of the iconic Chinese Theater, chased by billowing clouds of smoke and flailing flames. Rhodey hit the brakes, pulled as far over as he could get and jumped out. I followed suit and registered the gun he had drawn from somewhere, as I jogged beside him. “Get back in the car!” he yelled at me.

“I’m a reporter! This is what I do. And I can help!” I yelled right back. “If nothing else, hanging out with y’all has given me lots of practice directing people away from crises.” 

Rhodey groaned. “You’re almost as bad as Tony sometimes!” Screams issued from the buildings ahead, and from the cars that swerved to avoid panicky pedestrians.

“I’ll take that as a compliment!” I put on a burst of speed, caught up with him and took hold of his jacket sleeve, slowing him just long enough for a quick kiss. “Be careful!” With that I let him go on and started doing what I did know how to do. I guided shaken shoppers and street performers to safety on sidewalks and in the shelter of business doorways, whose bright holiday decorations suddenly seemed surreal. I found walking wounded, administered quick emergency first aid when I could (I had decided that was another class I needed to take if I was going to keep company with people like Tony, who invariably brought trouble to the party with them), and hooked them up with the first responders who started to arrive within minutes. And as usual, I was constantly making mental and recorded notes for the writeup that would be expected as soon as my bosses found out I was on the scene.

Time ceased to have a meaning. I could have been working there for hours or just a few minutes before my ear caught Rhodey’s voice in the distance calling for EMTs. That was a good sign; it meant he was still finding people alive, people who could be saved. Around me, things seemed to be at least under control, so I started to trot up the block toward the ruined theater. My trot broke into a run when Rhodey called out again, because there was a frantic edge to his voice, something I had only heard a couple of times before, and never in person.

The front of the historic theater was ripped up like a cardboard cutout. Rubble littered the sidewalk and entry plaza. Two paramedics and a fireman passed me and I slid into their wake, drafting behind them across the chaotic scene, betting I knew where they were bound. Sure enough, I heard Rhodey again calling, “Please, hurry!” He knelt on the concrete beside a large male body, half shielded by the remains of a vendor’s cart. As the responders went down to assess the situation, I got a good look and understood Rhodey’s alarm. Happy Hogan lay, bloody and still, on the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think Rhodey would be a Samuel L. fan, don't you? LOL. It's easy to imagine him doing that Pulp Fiction outfit for one of Tony's infamous Halloween parties back in the day.
> 
> The nightmare Pepper describes is the same one she alluded to in her phone exchange with Tony, a few chapters back. I'd seen Iron Man 1 half a dozen times, but it wasn't until I finally saw it on a big screen that Pepper's voice screaming Tony's name jumped out at me during the waterboarding scene. Now, intellectually, I know it's the filmmakers' way of conveying the bit in the script novel, where Tony's last thought before being knocked unconscious in the ambush is of Pepper (he mentioned that to her in that phone call, too, you may recall). BUT since my brain has always had a paranormal bent, this instantly became my headcanon: that, tortured and terrified, Tony's mind reached out (because I think he's always been a little bit psychic--more on that in future installments) and touched Pepper's sleeping mind on the other side of the world. So what she's telling about here is her glimpses of his ordeal, filtered through the dream-state into a form she could comprehend. 
> 
> And yes, Pepper waking up a few seconds sooner short-circuited one of the most painful (imho) scenes in the whole dang MCU, because doggone it, this is my verse and I do what I want. :) Also, I kind of think the Mandarin is a little foreshadowing of a later, bigger MCU bad guy, whose motivation is understandable even though the means he chooses to address it is insane. (hello, Thanos)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the Chinese Theater explosion, Chrissy argues with Rhodey and sits with Happy. Tony calls the Mandarin out, and Pepper plans to leave town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading and commenting! I even ran into somebody in the comment section of another fic, talking about this and sending a friend the link to the series. It makes me feel great to know people are enjoying it. :)
> 
> Things are starting to get tight here. Hang on!

A team of military investigators arrived shortly and took Rhodey aside to get his report. I kept one eye on them while I continued calming people and helping them get organized. It warmed me when he gestured toward me and the heads of the man and woman in uniform turned in my direction. “Any leads?” I asked when he came over.

He made a displeased noise. “It matches the other Mandarin-linked attacks. And you did not hear that from me or anybody else, and you cannot report it.”

“Rhodey! I’m as discreet as anybody, but if people are getting hurt right here in the U.S. now, they need to be informed and warned. This is the fourth one but the first on American soil, if I’m remembering right—”

“Wrong on both counts, and don’t ask me anything more.” He took my elbow in a firm grasp and steered me out onto the remains of the sidewalk and back toward his car. 

I kept arguing my point. Rhodey kept saying it was not his call and I needed to back off. Things escalated, and then he was scolding me for going to prisons to do interviews and into alien war zones to sniff out scoops, and I was reminding him I was a grown-ass woman with sense enough to take care of myself. We kept coming back to the moment, and his refusal to let me report the truth. When we got to my apartment, I climbed out of the car with a simple “Bye.”

“Chrissy!” Rhodey called as I started to stalk up the stairs. “I’m just doing my job.”

“So am I,” I replied and kept going.

I got a few hours of sleep, then went to work. My first stop was the still smoldering remains of the Chinese Theatre’s façade, then Mercy Hospital, where Happy and the other injured had been taken. After interviewing some medical staff and the families of a couple of victims, I finally allowed myself to ask about Happy and was shown to a private room just off the main intensive care unit. Tony stood beside the bed. “Hey,” I said quietly. “How’s he doing?”

“Hey, cornbread. He’s…well, stable, which is as good as can be expected right now, according to the doctors. Couple of broken ribs, hairline skull fracture, some second degree burns. Not sure whether his left eye is gonna make it. They’ve got him in an induced coma, to keep any brain swelling down.” 

I stepped to the bedside. Happy’s head and arms were bandaged. His face was swollen, scraped and cut, and an oxygen tube was taped at his mouth. “Lord, let him come out of this okay,” I breathed. “At least they cleaned him up. He looks better than last night.”

“Yeah, Rhodey said you two were there.”

I nodded. “We argued after we left. He doesn’t want me this deep into the Mandarin story. I tried to explain to him that’s not how this journalism thing works, or how I work. He did tell me this attack matched the MO of the others, but he swore me to secrecy. Not like that matters anymore, since from what I heard on the radio on the way over here, the Mandarin already took credit for it.” A nurse came in to check on Happy, and we stepped away to give her space to work. “Rhodey said you offered to help, but the Pentagon wants to do this themselves.”

Tony flopped into a chair against the wall and let out a small, tight laugh. “What’s that Southern thing you say? ‘Let ‘em want in one hand and shit in the other, and see which hand fills up first’?” He inclined his head toward the bed where Happy lay silent. “I’m in it now, whether they like it or not. This is personal.” My mouth opened to take issue, and then closed. “Could you stay here with him for a while, Chrissy? I’ve got…stuff to do, and a couple of SI security guys are coming to stand guard, but they’ll be out in the hall. I hate for him to be alone all the time, and he likes you. Just because he’s out, you know, people know things, still, when they’re unconscious. They can hear things.”

“So I’m told,” I nodded. “I’d love to sit with him, Tony.”

“Thanks.” He stood and gestured toward the TV set mounted across from the bed. “Hey, do you mind leaving that on? That’s his show. Sunday nights. PBS. Downton Abbey. He thinks it's elegant.”

“I know.” I grinned a little and dropped into a whisper. “Don’t tell him, but I got him a really classy English tea set for Christmas. I hope he likes it.” Tony’s answering smile was precarious, but his eyes were determined and his jaw grimly set. He left with the nurse, telling her to expect his security people, and asking her to be sure her staff wore their badges since Happy was a stickler for that. Just before they got out of my earshot I caught my name, probably Tony explaining who I was and why I was there. 

“Hey, Happy,” I said while I scooted the chair close to the bed. “Tony asked me to keep you company. I imagine I’m one of the few people he would trust to be here.” I sat down and put my hand gently on an unburned part of his arm. “Considering how I always worry about maintaining my journalistic integrity, I guess that ought to bother me. I’m ‘compromised’, I suppose. Tell you what, though, if I’m honest, when he asked, all I felt was honored.” I glanced up at the TV. “Come on. How many billionaires, heck, how many wealthy people worth far less, know what their employee’s favorite show is, much less why you like it? You’re more than an employee to him, though. You know that.” I patted the motionless arm. “I think I’m a lost cause, buddy. Tony’s a good fella, and I’m lucky to know him, and anybody who doesn’t like it can kiss my ass.”

I settled in, plugged my phone in to top off the charge, and pulled my StarkPad out of my oversized purse. Before I started transcribing the day’s interviews and moving them around to get a feel for how my article should flow, I pulled up a news feed to catch up. The Mandarin’s pompous rant claiming responsibility for the theater blast turned my stomach. “My disciples just destroyed another cheap American knockoff,” he declaimed. “The Chinese Theatre. Mr. President, I know this must be getting frustrating. But this season of terror is drawing to a close. Don't worry, the big one is coming.” 

_Nope_ , I thought. _Don’t think I could keep from wanting to bust a cap in the old bastard’s ass if I was face to face with him._ I was glad I had my earbuds in; hearing this would upset Happy, even unconscious. I started to close the browser but paused when an alert popped up in the corner: TONY STARK PRESS STATEMENT ON MANDARIN ATTACK. I groaned, steeled myself and clicked on the link.

“--holiday greeting I've been wanting to send to the Mandarin. I just didn't know how to phrase it until now. My name is Tony Stark, and I'm not afraid of you. I know you're a coward. So I've decided that you just died, pal. I'm gonna come get the body. There's no politics here. It's just good old-fashioned revenge. There's no Pentagon. It’s just you and me. And on the off chance you're a man, here's my home address. 10880 Malibu Point. I'll leave the door unlocked.”

_Oh shit. OH SHIT_. I was already fumbling for my phone as onscreen, Tony threw something and stalked out of camera range. After an instant’s debate, I pulled up my contact list and punched his picture. While it rang, I jerked the charger out of the wall and went to the farthest corner of the room with my back to the bed. “God _damn_ it, Tony!” I hissed when he picked up.

To his credit, he didn’t even ask what I was pissed about. “What? It’s not like any idiot can’t google my address.”

“Yeah, right, but not every idiot would think to do it. You didn’t have to draw every damn villain on the planet’s attention to you, dumbass. Oh, not to mention, to anybody else who might be in your house with you, like, oh I dunno, your girlfriend who also happens to be one of my best friends??” 

It took everything in me not to scream at him for putting Pepper and himself in unnecessary danger, and from the uncharacteristically long silence, he could tell. “I’ll be there,” he finally said. “I’m on my way home right now. I’ve got plenty of suits, and JARVIS on guard. With only one road in and out, I’ll get extra security set up. She’ll be fine.”

I heard a beep and glanced at my screen. “Speaking of Pepper, she’s on my other line. Be careful, hot rod. I’ll be praying.” I switched lines. “Hey gal. Yes, I heard. I was just chewing Tony out for showing his whole ass on TV, in fact.”

A vexed grunt answered me. “I guess we’ll have to postpone our Christmas dinner,” Pepper replied.

“Sounds like it.” I suppressed a sigh. I had given up on buying Christmas gifts for them (what the hell could a reporter afford that they didn’t have?) and Pep had asked me to just come over and cook and spend an evening before I flew home to Tennessee for a few days. Neither of them had family here in California, so just having the house smell like home cooking, and having people they cared for around them, was going to make it special. It would have been hard enough, now, with Rhodey and me arguing, but better that than this. 

“I’m packing right now,” she went on. “We’re leaving. I will not stay here with a target painted on our heads.” 

“Do you need me to come help? I’m at the hospital right now. Tony asked me to sit with Happy for a little while but—”

“No, it’s fine. I’m just packing essentials, and it’s not like we can’t afford to pick up any incidentals we need once we get—wherever we end up going.”

“Okay, but call me if you think of anything I can do.” I glanced over at the still form in the bed and had a thought. “Hey Pep, who does the hospital have on record to make medical decisions for Happy? If it’s Tony, be sure they know how to get in touch with him.”

“I’ll ask him.” Shuffling sounded in the background, and I envisioned my friend moving around the big house collecting her needs. “Thank you, Chrissy, for everything.”

“You’d do it for me. Just stay in touch, and let me know y’all are all right.” I got off the phone and sat back down, leftover fatigue from the night before beginning to catch up with me. A few moments with eyes closed, breathing and praying with each breath, and a kind nurse’s offer of a diet Coke blew a second wind into me. I spent the rest of the day by Happy’s bedside, talking to him, chatting with the nurses, and working.

Late in the afternoon, I finally said goodbye to Happy and the second shift staff. My phone was fully charged and it had not rung again, which I hoped boded well. By now, Tony and Pepper could be in another state if they had driven; I bet they’d flown though, which meant they might be sipping drinks on some tropical island. Nice way to ring in Christmas, even if it was caused by a damn terrorist—

Every TV in the hospital’s main lobby was showing the same image, a wrecked building sliding in slow motion off a seaside cliff. I walked closer, and everything around me suddenly felt unreal, as if I had stepped over some border between universes. 

I knew that building. I knew it well, and my heart almost literally stopped when I saw the ruins of it. I hit the door running, dropped into my car and hit the gas, pointed toward Malibu and what was left of the Stark mansion.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of the Mandarin's attack on the Malibu mansion, Chrissy reassures Pepper. With Maya Hansen in tow, the friends decamp and start to make plans, but are interrupted by an unexpected arrival.

This time, nobody was going to stop me. The one-eyed man named Fury could have been standing in the middle of the road leading up to Tony’s house, and I would have run his ass over without a second thought. 

Generally, I parked below the house, by the garage entrance, then used the passcode to go in and upstairs on the elevator. I teased Tony that he was more Southern than he thought, since he no longer expected me to come to the front door; where I come from, the front door is for company. When I came within sight, though, the garage door was completely blocked by fallen rocks. I jerked the steering wheel and raced up the driveway. 

Pepper sat slumped on a narrow ledge outside, surrounded by chunks of concrete. A dark-haired woman stood beside her; she looked up at my approach, but Pepper didn’t move. I hit my brakes before I rolled into the damage zone and lost a tire. “Pep!” I called as I came out my door and dashed toward her, my shoes crunching on shattered glass.

That finally got her attention, but she still looked dazed. Her face and arms were scuffed and scraped but otherwise she appeared intact. She stood and reached for me, and I felt her shiver when I hugged her. “Chrissy…” she whispered. 

“Thank heavens you’re okay. The poor house, though! Where’s Tony? I bet he’s already down trying to dig the bots out, huh? DUM-E’ll be scared to death until his daddy gets…to him…huh?”

My friend’s shaking had only intensified. My voice petered out, and when she pulled back, the dull shock in her eyes was giving way to tears. “He’s gone, Chrissy. The house…” One hand gestured feebly behind her. Reality was even worse than the TV images. Only a few feet past the sleek entranceway, Tony’s mansion was simply—gone. Shreds of insulation, dangling wires, hunks of drywall, a neck that looked to have been ripped right off an electric guitar, and the tattered remains of an artificial Christmas tree: those were all that was left. 

“How?” 

“Helicopters. They were disguised as news choppers, and then they…it was like watching one of those movies about Vietnam, when they opened fire. Rockets came streaking in, and Tony called his newest suit, put it on me to get us out, then called it back, but even so, nobody could have gotten out…it all went over the cliff, and he went with it…”

I swallowed hard, and shook my head briefly to clear it. “Don’t go there, Pep. You know Tony better than anybody. He’s tougher than boiled owl. Don’t give up on him so fast.”

She didn’t reply; instead, she turned, and started to walk around the side of the house. All I said was “be careful,” and watched her go, wishing with every cell of my body that I could kill the Mandarin with my bare hands. Overhead, the evening sky was beautiful, too beautiful to arch over such horror.

“So, meeting of the ex-girlfriends’ club convening?”

I turned to the dark-haired woman who had walked up beside me and spoken. “Oh. Uh, no. Not even close.” I introduced myself as usual, as a friend of Pepper and Tony’s. She seemed a little bit stunned herself, but the look she shot me was more than a little bit skeptical. What, did she think we had threesomes on the regular? 

“Maya Hansen,” she said. A dozen questions crowded into my mouth, but I couldn’t spit any of them out, not now. I nodded in acknowledgement, but my eyes kept being pulled back to the ruins. The kitchen where I had planned to cook a holiday meal, the couch where I first held hands with Rhodey, the floor Pepper had slid across on sock feet one night until she fell on her butt and we all laughed, Tony’s basement sanctum full of gorgeous old cars and his sweet bots that were practically people, all were broken to bits now. I clasped my hands tightly together, pressed them to my mouth, and prayed silently, with everything I had, that Tony was safe somehow.

After a few minutes, Pepper returned. She seemed calmer now, more composed, more herself, and less unsteady when I hugged her again. Maya Hansen gave me another dubious look. “From the way you’re reacting to—this—I’m still finding it hard to believe you aren’t one of Tony’s exes,” she said. “But from the way she’s reacting to you,” she added with a tilt of her head toward Pepper, “I find it hard to believe you are.”

I managed a small chuckle. “I hope I get to tell Tony you said that, and watch him laugh.”

With a firm little nod, Pepper cast her gaze around at the devastation. “We’d better get out of here. It’s getting dark, nobody can search for—anything—till daylight, and I don’t want to risk being here if the Mandarin’s people come back.”

“Garage is blocked,” I told her. “C’mon, I’ll drive. I’d offer my apartment, but it’s barely big enough for me, really, let alone two houseguests.” Rhodey probably would have scolded me yet again for getting myself into the middle of another situation, but frankly, I didn’t care right now. Besides Pepper’s car being inaccessible, I wouldn’t have trusted either woman behind a wheel, after the shock they had been through.

Pepper pulled out her SI corporate credit card and directed me to a hotel. “Maya,” she asked while I drove, “why were you at the house tonight? What was so important that you had to speak to Tony?”

“I…” The other woman hesitated, and I didn’t have to look in the rearview mirror to know she was eyeing me with uncertainty from the back seat.

“Chrissy is like family,” Pepper assured her. “Anything you would say to me you can say to her.”

Maya took a breath. “I think that my boss is working for the Mandarin. So before we talk about it, I suggest that we get ourselves someplace safe.”

Pepper frowned. “The hotel we’re going to has excellent security; it should do fine. But—your boss works for the Mandarin, you think? Tony said you're a botanist.”

Maya let out a dry little laugh. “That figures. What I actually am is a biological DNA coder, running a team of forty out of a privately funded think tank. But sure, you can call me a botanist.”

I whistled. “So, you’re thinking your boss may be perverting your science for biowarfare, maybe?”

This time I did glance in the mirror. The woman’s eyes were narrowed. She had underestimated me, I suspected, and now she was having to recalibrate her first opinions. People don't expect me to be a science geek. I liked that, usually. “That’s a definite possibility.”

My brain began to race, cataloguing ways biological research could be warped into a terrorist threat. Germ release, poisons, the list was endless. “This boss of yours,” Pepper said slowly, “does he have a name?”

“Aldrich Killian.”

Pepper has always claimed to be a terrible liar, but after several years of running Stark Industries, she had developed a great poker face. I was probably one of the few people who would have noticed her slight start of shock from where she rode shotgun beside me, and I wondered what the name meant to her. 

Once we checked into the hotel, I went up to the big room Pepper had requested and flopped into a chair. Pepper called room service. “Are you staying for a while?” she asked me.

“Planning to,” I replied. “I thought I’d make a quick run to get you some essentials, before I head home.”

She ordered food for all three of us, then handed me her credit card to take shopping. Maya excused herself to the bathroom. As soon as the door closed I hissed, “What’s with the Killian guy? And no, you’re really subtle, I just know you that well.”

“He’s…my ex.”

“Oh, you are kidding, right? This is going to be one of those stories? With exes crawling out of the woodwork?”

The answering smile was brief, watery, but genuine. “He came to my office recently, wanting SI to buy into some biotech that he was working on. Something called Extremis; a delivery system, like a virus, that supposedly could penetrate and alter DNA. I turned him down, told him it sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. Too easy to turn into a weapon.” She inclined her head toward the bathroom door. “It sounds like he may have had the same idea, if Maya is right, and the Mandarin may have been the highest bidder.”

“Sounds like it,” I said with dread sitting in my stomach like a cold burger. “What can we do?”

“Us, not much. Tony, maybe more. He’s okay, and he’s tracking the Mandarin.” 

I suppressed a squeak. “How do you know?”

“I found one of his suit helmets at the house. He left me a message that downloaded when I put it on.”

“So you got to be a superhero too, briefly?” I grinned. “Speaking of which, should we try to contact the Avengers? Maybe if some of them are free they could help—no, wait, Rhodey said the Pentagon doesn’t want them involved in this, shit. Supervillains are kind of their remit, though.”

“I’m not sure how we’d get in touch with them anyway. I had Phil Coulson’s number; he was the liaison with SHIELD, the Homeland Security agency I told you about, who worked with Tony. But he—was killed, in New York.”

I squeezed my friend’s hand. “Tony will keep his head down, so we’ll have to let on that we still consider him missing. In the morning, we need to help Maya get connected with law enforcement, though, somebody who can protect her. And we’ll call Rhodey, I bet he knows a safe house you can hole up in—”

The toilet flushed and Maya emerged. I pulled my phone out to text my cousin in Jackson that I probably wouldn’t make it back to Tennessee for the family Christmas get-together. “All right,” Pepper said to Maya. “We’re in a secure place now. So, what happened?”

The scientist settled on the bed. “Before he built rockets for the Nazis,” she began, “Wernher von Braun dreamed of space travel. He stargazed.” Her soft chuckle dripped of irony. “Do you know what he said when the first V-2 hit London? ‘The rocket performed perfectly. It just landed on the wrong planet.’ See, we all begin wide-eyed. Pure science. And then the ego steps in, the obsession…and one day, you look up, and you're a long way from shore.” 

Pepper nodded. “You can't be too hard on yourself, Maya,” she said sympathetically. “I mean, you gave your research to a think tank.”

“Yeah, but Killian built that think tank on military contracts.” 

“That's exactly what Stark Industries used to do, though,” I reminded her. 

“Right,” Pepper said. “So, don't judge yourself.”

Maya looked from her to me, and seemed overcome with emotion for a moment, staring down at her lap. “Thank you, both of you. I really appreciate that.”

There was a knock at the door. I got up and stepped to one side, mentally scanning my surroundings for things that could become impromptu weapons, as my self-defense course had taught. Pepper opened the door and welcomed the waiter bringing dinner. A moment later, he was seized and pushed aside by a stocky blond man who grabbed Pepper’s wrist and kicked the door shut behind him. “Chris!” she yelled. “Maya! Run!”

“Oh hell no,” I growled. Out the side of my mouth to Maya I added, “Grab something, girl, and get ready to swing. Two of us, one of him, and he’s not that big, I’m not leaving Pep to—”

I stopped talking when two things appeared almost simultaneously. 

One was the gun the man, obviously Aldrich Killian, held to Pepper’s head. 

The other was the gun Maya pulled from nowhere, and held to mine.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy spars with Aldrich Killian and starts to learn the truth about the Mandarin. She and Pepper engineer a break for freedom that falls short, and they find themselves captives.

“So, Maya.” Killian’s voice was smooth, slick, and insincere. “You want to tell me why you were at Stark's mansion?”

“I'm trying to fix this thing.” The woman’s voice beside my ear was holding back panic by a thread. “I didn't know you and the master were gonna blow the place up.”

_Oh for fuck’s sake_ , I thought angrily. _Their master, the Mandarin, obviously._

“I see,” the man purred. “So you were trying to save Stark when he threatened us?”

Maya groaned. “I've told you, Killian, we need him.”

Pepper tried to jerk away from the grip on her arm, probably thinking they were sufficiently distracted by their dispute. They weren’t; Killian shifted and caught her around the neck. She made a little noise and I tensed. “Pepper, Pepper, Pepper,” he cooed. His fake solicitude was nauseating. 

“Look,” Maya protested, “if we want to launch product next year, I need Stark! He’s the only one who can make Extremis what you want, and I want.”

Her companion appeared to ponder her argument, then nodded. “He just lacked a decent incentive. Now, he has one.”

It made sense now. Pepper wouldn’t give the man the patronage he wanted, so he figured he would force Tony to help them prepare their bioweapons for sale by threatening her. From the way her eyes flicked to me, Pepper had figured that out too. “Then let her go,” she managed with an effort, waving her hand in my direction. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this, Aldrich. She’s just a reporter who came out to do an interview with us.”

That wasn’t going to fly, unless Maya found the backbone to put backing other women over profit. Her long pause gave me hope, but her vexed sigh told me her choice before she even opened her mouth. “You know I know better, Pepper. I’ve seen and heard too much. She’s clearly close to you, and to Tony.” 

I yelped and fought her briefly when she stuck her hand in my pocket and came out with Pepper’s corporate credit card. She still had the gun, though, and he still had his pressed to my friend’s temple. Trying to talk us out of here might work better than getting physical; these odds were against us at the moment. And there was one thing we knew that Maya, and by extension Killian, did not. “You’re wasting your breath,” I told him. “What good is Pepper going to do you? Tony went—” I faltered, choked, and broke my voice, making as to force the words out past tears. “H-he went over the cliff, into the ocean, with his house that your cohorts blew up. Unless you’re figured out how to resurrect somebody, you’re out of luck—”

“Oh, not so fast.” The man’s attention was on me now, which was fine; it might give Pepper a chance to break away. “My tech caught a heat sig coming up from the water after the attack on Stark’s house. The trackers lost it, but I’m certain it was an Iron Man suit. He’s alive, and he will come after Pepper. I’ll keep you around, though. Loose lips sink ships, after all. And I can use a spare.”

“A spare?” I spat. “I’ve never been considered a spare anything. Spare what?”

Killian cocked his head, as if amused at my spunk. That worked for me; I had used it to my favor back when I had to confront Justin Hammer, but this man seemed more than a little brighter than he. “A spare…guinea pig, let’s say.”

_He wants a lab rat? Better me than Pep, then._ “Fine. You want a damn guinea pig, I’m your huckleberry. You hurt Pepper, you will have the wrath of God, also known as Tony Stark, down on you like a ton of bricks. You take one mouthy reporter, not so much. Let her go and we’ll see what we can work out like civilized people.” 

His eyes brightened. Damn, he was getting enamored of this give and take. I was going to need a long shower once this mess was done, because talking to him just felt smarmy, but the more I could suck him in, the better. “I like your nerve,” he said. “What’s your name?”

When I hesitated, Maya answered for me. “Christine Everhart.”

His mouth flew open. “From Vanity Fair!” he cried in frank delight. “I’m a fan! What a pleasure to meet you at last.” Oh fuck. He would be the kind of egotistical asshole who kept up with the press coverage of his exploits. “Your piece on the Mandarin was impressive. You’re fair and balanced. That’s not a common quality in reporters.”

“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. There is no equivalence when you’re killing innocent people. All I said was that the problems the Mandarin calls attention to are real problems—but two wrongs don’t make a right. How can you claim you care about those issues when you’re sacrificing blameless lives, deliberately?” I was on a roll, and I had his full focus; good, if Pepper could seize a chance to pull free and run, but bad, because I couldn’t safely break eye contact with him. Every second I held him was another second we stayed alive, though. _God, give me the words_. “A person who really wants to change things steps up, takes responsibility, is accountable.” That sounded more like somebody else, somebody Pep and I both knew. “If you truly have a desire to move the needle, to make a case to people, alienating them with a reign of terror is not the way to go. I’ve been offering an opportunity for an interview for weeks now. You, or your—employer—could have taken me up on it anytime.”

“Well, of course, I couldn’t do that. The grand gesture I’m planning will get much more attention than even a glossy capitalist magazine cover story would. I’ll get what I want using the Mandarin name. But I can definitely use an experienced hand in the media, so I think I’ll take you with me, and give you an exclusive. Does that make your little journalistic heart beat a bit faster, hm?”

I’d worked him around to wanting something from me. Good. I looked down at the floor for a moment, and my foot inched toward the lamp cord. “I agree, if you let Pepper go. Two hostages are twice the trouble of one. She can meet with Tony—if he really is okay—convey your terms, and work from there. Considering that you may have just killed one of my friends, and another one is in the hospital because of you and your bunch, I’m not giving you shit while you have a gun trained on a third one.” 

Maya shuffled behind me. Killian screwed his mouth up for a moment as if mulling over my offer. “Ah, how about no?” he finally said, while his free hand fumbled in his pocket.

I shook my head at him in mock disappointment. “And here I thought you might be smart enough to do this the easy way. You’re just a pretty face, huh? It’s a shame for good looks to be wasted on bad guys.” Situation be damned, Pepper actually snickered. Killian glared at her, and that moment’s distraction was all I needed. The toe of my shoe jerked the cord, and the heavy lamp on the bedside table fell. It crashed to the floor, though, instead of falling toward me. “Go, Pep!” I yelled and ducked, trying to grab for the lamp to swing at him.

Pepper jerked loose from his grasp, planted a high heel in his knee and grabbed for the door handle. Maya was coming up from the floor. I put myself in her line of fire; I hoped she wouldn’t shoot, but if she did at least it would attract attention from outside. When Pepper cried out, though, I spun around.

Killian’s hand was over hers on the metal door handle, glowing orangey-red, with waves of heat rolling off it that I could feel from several feet away. Pepper was struggling to get her hand away, tears of pain streaming from her eyes. Instead of the pistol, his free hand held a syringe, the needle plunging into her neck. 

With a yell, I lunged at him, until my face came up against his burning hand. Behind him, Pepper whimpered faintly and crumpled to the floor, clutching blistered fingers to her chest. The next instant, I felt a sharp sting in my neck from behind, and the room began to spin and went dark. My last thought was _ohh, Rhodey is really gonna be mad at me now…_

…A steady hum sounded around me. My body lay on a padded surface, but I woke enough to remember what had happened. Voices murmured nearby, and I stayed perfectly still until they moved farther away. Tensing my muscles informed me that my hands were restrained behind my back. At least I wasn’t hurting, so not badly injured, and I prayed Pepper was all right, wherever she was. My luck ran out when I shifted again to feel for the weight of my phone in my pants pocket. “Damn. Lois Lane’s coming around.” Well, since Killian had spotted me, there was no reason to play possum anymore. He was hovering over me when I opened my eyes, so I spat and kicked at him just on principle, and to remind him I was no turncoat. I sucked in a breath to yell, but it came out as a screech when his hand pressed against the side of my head. It felt like falling against a hot stove, and the pain locked my body up; I couldn’t move even when I saw another syringe coming at me…

…It was so hot. My skin felt tight and itchy; how could I have gotten sunburned over every inch of myself? I tried to rouse myself enough to find some lotion, but my arms wouldn’t move—couldn’t move, as I found when I was aware enough. Something hard was wrapped around me, holding me upright and tilted slightly back, and pinning my limbs and torso down. I could barely even move my head, my shoulders and chest fixed in place by bars like the safety harness on a theme park ride. When I heard a low cry of pain coming from beside me, and then a louder one, I struggled to turn. The heat increased; sweat ran down my back, but instead of tickling it burned like hot wax. “Shit, there they go again,” a male voice grumbled. 

“Hold off on the night-night juice,” said another man. “Boss wants ‘em awake for a couple minutes, to put on a little show for his guest. Smile for the cameras, ladies!”

The fuzz in my brain began to clear, and I started to put the pieces of recent time back together. Killian had wanted guinea pigs for the virus Pepper had mentioned. That idea seemed more likely when my wriggles yielded a sharp pull at the tender skin on the inside of both my elbows, right where an IV needle would insert. As the drugs I’d evidently been given wore off, though I was more alert, the waves of pain throughout my body grew worse too. It felt like I was on fire from the inside, hot and shaking cold all at once. I clenched my fists and fought to stay silent; I wasn’t giving anybody a show if I could avoid it. Who could Killian be exhibiting his hostages to? His master the Mandarin seemed the most likely guess, which made me all the more determined not to break down.

That resolve lasted until a scream tore through the air near my ear, seconds later, and I was alert enough now to recognize the voice. “Pepper!” I gasped, and pushed with what strength I had against the restraints to turn my head. When I finally succeeded, I saw she was strapped down as I seemed to be. Needles running to containers of fluids were thrust into both her arms and taped in place, and she was drenched with sweat. She wore her pants and a sports top, and horribly, the exposed flesh I could see glowed, lines of orange-red outlining bones and organs beneath her skin. 

She writhed again, her head rolled, and she screamed, “TONY!!” He couldn’t find us, I was certain, and I just stared and shuddered, wondering if I looked like that, wondering if either of us would survive, and wondering if we would be better off if the answer to that were yes or no. Another agonizing swell rolled over me just then and yanked an involuntary groan from my throat.

Over the roaring in my ears I faintly made out the second man saying, “K, boss turned off the live feed. Knock ’em out again, that hollerin’s givin’ me a headache.” A moment later, a red-hot poker of pain stabbed my arm. This time I didn’t fight the darkness when it came, even though I didn’t know if I would wake from it…


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Killian explains what he expects of Chrissy, and gives her her first assignment. She is not pleased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longish chapter, brace yourselves...

I did wake, though. This time it was sudden, as if somebody had slapped me. My vision was blurry, but I blinked sweat and tears away to watch hands pull needles from my arms and tape bandages over them with quick motions. In another minute, the bars and straps that held me clicked and moved away. I wanted to come out swinging, but I could barely stand up; more hard hands held me upright and drew me forward. 

“Congratulations, Miss Everhart. You survived Extremis. Welcome to our brave new world.” Aldrich Killian stepped into my line of sight, a mocking little smile on his lips, and took hold of my arm as the other hands pulled my wrists behind me again. “Forgive the zip ties. You’ve proven yourself to be a feisty little thing, and the Mandarin can’t be too careful. Once you’ve demonstrated you can take direction and be cooperative, we can dispense with such vulgarities.”

My lip curled and I looked around as my head cleared. We appeared to be in a lab, but a crude one, rigged up in a large echoey space. When my legs felt less like jello, I pulled away from his grip and turned around. the tilted table that had held me hung empty, but beside it stood a second that held Pepper. I tried to go toward her; Killian caught hold of me again.

“She’s fine, just sedated.” She looked it, hanging limp in the bonds, but breathing and no longer glowing. _I’m sorry, girlfriend,_ I thought in despair. “Your compliance will help to ensure she stays fine—in addition to ensuring that you stay fine, of course.”

I glared at him. “Extremis,” I said after a pause to gather my thoughts. “Pepper told me a little about it. You…have turned us both into bioweapons?”

“Not exactly. Come, walk with me. I’ve got you a nice clear vantage point set up for the Mandarin’s big broadcast. We can talk as I escort you there, then I’ll come back and wake Pepper.” 

He towed me out of the lab and down a narrow corridor. When we passed an open doorway, I caught a snatch of conversation, “--give me cameras A through E and we'll do a full tech rehearsal—"

I had no idea what Killian was planning, but once again it sounded like my best option right now was to get him talking and keep him talking for as long as I could. “Doesn’t seem as though I have a choice,” I replied in what I hoped was a suitably reluctant tone. “I’m listening. What did you do to me?”

“I didn’t do anything to you. I _gifted_ you. Extremis is brilliant stuff. Once the body adapts, it can grant rapid healing, superior strength and agility and endurance, all kinds of little upgrades to the meatsuit. Now, there are some drawbacks, chief among them being its volatility. It taps into the body’s bioelectricity, and sometimes…it overheats. Goes poof. Blows things up in the immediate vicinity, too. Not something you want to experience, nor something I would wish for you.”

Damn. The supposed bombings were people exploding—people carrying this virus in their bodies—this virus that I was now carrying. I fought back the urge to drop to my knees and puke. “Fair warning,” I got out, “I don’t think I’ll take to slavery very well.”

“Oh! Nor would I expect you to, my dear.” Still gripping my arm, we walked briskly through narrow corridors. The metal floor beneath my feet swayed slightly, and it didn’t feel like I was faint again; it felt like a ship’s motion. “You’ll be compensated more than adequately for the use of your writing talents, I promise you. And I will have sole access to the means to control Extremis, once I, um, persuade Stark to work with me to complete the stabilization, and you’ll need that in order to stay alive and well, so, there you go. What more motivation could you want?”

“Damn,” I mourned. “That sounded good for a minute, but if you’re basing all this on the hope that Tony will knuckle under to you, I believe you’re screwed.” We emerged into night air, cool and tinged with the freshness of sea salt, down a long metal staircase and onto the deck of a huge vessel, with loading cranes hanging overhead. “Where are we?”

_“Roxxon Norco_. Ring a bell?”

Of course it did. “Spilled a million gallons of crude oil off Pensacola Beach, two years ago, I think it was?” He had let slip an important tidbit, and now I knew we were being held in south Florida, where, if I recalled right, the decommissioned oil tanker was in dry dock. “A co-worker of mine covered it for our magazine. It was a terrible mess.”

“Putting it mildly,” Killian nodded. “A terrible mess, and no one suffered any consequences. That’s about to change, though.” He lifted his free hand and gestured. High above the deck, I could make out a human form, hanging spread-eagle by cables attached to its arms. Spotlights outlined the figure against the night sky. “The Mandarin’s justice,” he declaimed, “since the rule of law failed. The execution will be broadcast live, but I'm a bit old-fashioned; sometimes there’s just no substitute for the written word." His hand moved to indicate a high ledge. "Your first assignment, Miss Everhart, will be to observe and report the passing of judgement, in the clear-eyed and impartial style you have become famous for.”

We halted beside a small packing crate, the size and shape of a phone booth, with a cable fastened to its top. Killian grasped my other arm and backed me into the box; it felt entirely too much like a coffin. “I’ve done the math,” he said in a manner that seemed an actual attempt to reassure me. “The pyrotechnics won’t get anywhere near you, but you’ll be close enough to see everything. We’ll discuss your deadline afterward, along with terms of employment and all that.”

When he let go of me, I launched myself forward, only to be stopped by a door slamming shut. A window about the size of a face, covered with wire mesh, let me see out. My captor tsked at me. “You are a worthless sack of shit,” I snarled.

“Maybe.” The false good humor fled, and his eyes went cold as metal. “But this worthless sack of shit holds the reins to your life, missy, and don’t you ever forget it.” He backed away and waved his arm, and I heard the groan of metal overhead before the box left the deck and began to sway slightly back and forth like a pendulum. “Your perch will be perfectly safe and stable,” Killian called as I rose into the air, “as long as you don’t struggle. I can’t vouch for what might happen if you do.”

I froze in place. My wrists ached from the plastic biting into them, and my heart pounded. The box hovered for a minute, then lowered slightly with a small scraping noise and settled. Carefully, I moved to the door and peered out. As promised, I was a good distance from Killian’s sacrificial lamb, whoever it was. I had no desire to watch a cold-blooded murder, but neither would I let somebody die in front of me without at least bearing witness. My cell sat off to one side, so I shifted my weight with caution until I could make out the figure in better detail…

_Oh God._

_OH GOD._

It was the Iron Patriot armor.

“Rhodey,” I breathed, then screamed, “RHODEY!!”

The figure didn’t move; I was too far away and the ship too noisy for my voice to carry. My ears roared in a moment of utter panic, until I made out a pale face showing through the open faceplate. It clearly wasn’t Rhodey pinioned there, but that was scant comfort. How the hell had Killian gotten him out of his suit, and where was he? _God, help us!... Stop shaking, dumbass. Getting yourself hurt or killed isn’t going to do any good._

I lost track of time as I stood in that narrow box, afraid to move. My head spun as I frantically tried to take stock of the situation, and no matter what, the conclusion was the same as the one I had casually tossed at Killian. Pepper and I were both captives infected with some engineered killer bug; Rhodey was without his suit, if he was even alive; and Tony, though he was on the loose, and I would never bet against him in a crisis, would do whatever he had to do to protect Pepper. _Yep, we are pretty thoroughly screwed._

At least, that seemed the case until the explosions started. More precisely, streaks of light flashed across the dark sky, and then shit started to blow up. The streaks veered and wheeled in the air, and took on the shape of—Iron Man suits, a score of more of them. Pepper had said Tony had been manic, building suit after suit, and clearly she had not exaggerated. I wondered briefly if he was in one, or Rhodey. The others must have been under remote control of some kind, because they swooped like a flock of fierce metallic raptors, diving on Killian’s workers far below.

I watched with eager hope, then despair as several goons jointly attacked one suit, ripping its head off. It careened wildly to a crash, and sparked a fire on the deck. Moments later, I heard a louder boom, and craned my neck to look that way. Another suit had crashed, and steel drums went flying from the force of oil exploding. Pieces of cranes and walkways were tilting crazily, bending, breaking and plummeting. 

Still another suit flew into my line of sight, one man gripped in its arms, another holding on to it. It flipped and threw the grappler aside, then dropped the man it held onto one of the highest catwalks, just above the captive in the Iron Patriot. He landed neatly, leaned over the railing and yelled down. I couldn’t hear his voice, but the spotlights struck his face and my knees shook in relief. “Rhodey!” I hollered, even though I knew between the box and all the noise, he couldn’t hear me.

He looked around as if calculating how to get down and free the suit and its occupant, then grabbed one of the thick cables and slid smoothly down it to land on a large shipping container. Unfortunately, two of Killian’s goons had seen him too, and jumped up there to confront him. He produced a big pistol from nowhere and opened fire on them. Both the man and the woman menacing him were obviously hit; they jerked from the bullets’ force, but neither went down. Instead, they started to glow, the same way Pepper had. Damn, Killian had apparently weaponized his minions too. They rushed Rhodey and knocked him off the far end of the huge truck trailer.

I could only watch in helpless horror when the container suddenly tipped on end. Both Extremis-enhanced thugs fell away and the box swung wildly toward the hostage, unable to move out of its path. Then, unbelievably, I spotted Rhodey again! He grabbed onto one of the cables attached to his suit’s arm, and clung to it as the container fell from beneath his feet. It toppled to the deck with the most massive explosion yet. The impacts rocked the whole tanker, as huge as it was. The box that imprisoned me shifted, and I prayed it would hold.

Amid the animal-like roar of the burning, I caught the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. Heart in my throat, I squinted through the heat-distorted smoky air. Somehow, Rhodey had broken through the other cable pinning the Iron Patriot. He swung with the suit to a small observation platform, let go and dropped into a flawless roll like something you would see in a movie. When he came up, his gun was in his hand again; he fired and the cable that held the suit’s other arm parted. _He did NOT just do that_ , I thought in stunned disbelief as the suit and the man inside landed flat-footed and safe on the platform beside Rhodey. _I definitely should have gotten him something nicer than a pair of custom cuff links for Christmas_. It’s crazy the things that go through your mind in a moment of crisis, isn’t it?

They were closer and more secure, so I tried yelling again, but Rhodey was focused on his rescue mission, and the chaos was still deafening. He got the other man, an older gentleman in a nice business suit, out of the Iron Patriot and slid into it himself. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw him catch his charge in his arms and take off for the sky, safe.

Then my cell shifted, again, and again. The concussive effects of explosions and fires had not been figured into Killian’s equations meant to keep me alive. Sweating profusely, I moved to the farthest corner from the blazing deck far below, not that that was very far in the tiny crate which was now rocking back and forth. I started to work frantically to get my hands free, looking around for anything I could hook the zip tie on and break it. it would tear my wrists up, but better that than a plunge that would kill me. With my hands free, maybe I could get the door open, or at least balance my weight and shift the box back onto its perch.

Something gave behind my back. My hands were free, the plastic of the zip tie melted in two. I barely had time to wonder how hot it had to get to do that when the wood beneath my feet tipped and tumbled. I screamed, even knowing nobody but God would hear, as I fell.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The battle continues, and Pepper and Chrissy dive into the fray.

My head bounced off the wood, and I lay, breath knocked out of me, skin scorching hot again. After a minute, it occurred to me that if I was dead, either heaven wasn’t nearly what I had been led to expect, or I had ended up on the train going the opposite direction. I wiggled my fingers and toes, hands and feet, and finally persuaded my arms and legs to get me up on all fours. I could breathe, though the air I inhaled was hot and stank of burning oil, and nothing seemed to be broken.

Well, nothing on me was broken. The box I had been locked in was shattered. I thought the deck must have had some give to it that had let my body survive the fall, but not the rigid wood. That was a nice thought, until I remembered Killian’s words about the properties of Extremis, and the sight of Rhodey pumping bullets point-blank into the madman’s accomplices with no results. I sat back on my heels and, dreading what I might see, held my hands up and inspected them. They weren’t glowing, which was a good thing, but I looked around and found the remnants of the zip tie that had bound me, no more than a slip of twisted plastic now. Nothing in this box had been hot enough to do that; I felt the nails that had held it together, and the metal’s temperature wasn’t much different from the splintered boards. It had to be the virus with which I’d been forcibly infected.

No point in worrying about that now. Killian and Maya had both seemed certain Tony could make Extremis completely stable, and frankly, it was just about the only thing I would agree with them on. _Okay. Hands free, out of box, off precarious ledge. Good start. Worry about potentially explosive innards later. Right now, go look for Pepper, and Tony, because if his suits are here, he’s got to be._

I stayed on my knees for a moment more, gathering strength and breath and sending up another prayer for help; then I crawled free from the wrecked box, pausing to pull my pants leg loose from a particularly vicious shard of wood. Just about to assay standing and dust myself off, I was halted by a scream from above. My head snapped upward in time to see a figure fall from a narrow platform near the top of the scaffolding above the ship. It was a good two hundred feet down, if I had to guess: a long enough drop that I could make out black pants, black sport top, and red hair, before the flailing form vanished into the towering flames of the exploded shipping container.

A scream tried to force itself from my throat, but I wrestled it back. Yes, I wanted to scream, wanted to run to my friend. All I could make out at the point Pepper had fallen from was another figure, though, and not one in an armored suit. If it were Tony, he wouldn’t be up there unprotected, and he would have flown down and caught her. That meant she might have gotten free in the confusion, and was being pursued by Killian or one of his remaining underlings. Surely they would assume that fall had killed her, and heaven help her, it might have; but a fall almost as high hadn’t killed me, so I refused to give up hope. It was safer to not give myself away. That way, if Pepper had survived _(don’t go there, it’s more like ‘when I find her’)_ , we had two wild cards to play against our tormentor.

Instead of yelling, I stayed low and headed toward the conflagration. Grunts, yells and the crunch of blows drew my attention upward again, to a catwalk where a glowing male form fought with an armored figure. The sight lifted my spirits—that had to be Tony, alive and kicking ass as per usual. As I watched, though, the Extremis male, most likely Killian, landed a shot that knocked him bodily off the walkway. I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep from crying out, but after a short fall, the suit caught and he righted himself and shot back upward. I didn’t know if he had seen me, but right this instant, it was probably for the best that I hadn’t attempted to draw his eye. What he saw, Killian might too. 

Tony grabbed his opponent and flew high into the air. It looked like they might have landed on the topmost skywalk, but the damned smoke kept me from seeing that far. Reluctantly I lowered my eyes and focused on my own search. Moments later, more explosions sounded overhead and huge chunks of flaming debris began to rain down. I ducked and dodged and in the back of my mind worried. Extremis created terrible adversaries, if Killian could hold his own against Iron Man.

Something moved at the near edge of the container fire. Holding my breath, I scrambled over and around smoking rubble till I was close enough to feel a hot breeze coming off the blaze, and see Pepper pulling herself clear. I called her name and raced to her side.

“Chrissy!” she gasped and reached for me. I caught her hand, then let go instantly with a bitten-off yelp—she was lit from within, and her grip burned like taking hold of a hot cast iron skillet without a potholder. 

“Ow, sorry, how come I don’t get to glow, dammit?” I grumbled. Pepper made a small noise, and stared at her hands, the way I had stared at mine minutes before, but with mounting horror written plain on her face. “Calm down, hon. It’s gonna be okay. It’s the Extremis thing, and I’m pretty sure it’s what kept you from being squashed like a bug on a windshield when you fell. Me too, maybe.” She looked up with a start. I waved a hand toward the broken packing crate. “Long story, which I don’t really want to have to tell twice. Tony’s around here someplace, I think, so let’s go find him and get the fuck up out of here, okay?”

“He’s here,” she finally spoke. “The floor of Aldrich’s lab gave way…Tony tried to catch me, but I fell…”

“Oh gosh. He’s gonna be beside himself then. C’mon!” I tried to reach for her hand again, but she shook her head and pushed herself to her feet without help. “He was up there administering an ass-whooping to—” I turned to point up to where I had last seen the combatants, and was stopped by what I saw, or rather, what I did not see. The ledge and platform where Tony and Killian had stood was simply gone. It took a second to register, then the moment of shock was replaced by the welcome presence of reason. Tony was in his suit; he would be fine, certainly, wherever he was. I envisioned him snagging Killian by the scruff of the neck as the platform collapsed, and hauling him away to drop off with the relevant authorities. “Well, he was up there,” I amended. “Want to wait here, or shall we go look for him?”

Pepper furrowed her brow in consideration. Before she replied, we both jumped at a growling sound that could not be caused by fire. It came from behind her, the opposite direction from the way I had come, and the far side of the blazing debris field. As she started to turn, I spotted a fiery figure dragging itself away from us, toward the stern of the tanker. I grabbed the strap of her top, crouched and tugged her down with me. “Killian!” I hissed. “Damn.”

“Should we hide?” she asked, just as a different voice reached our ears. This one gasped, then let out a cry of obvious pain. Her body stilled, and when she looked at me, her eyes burned, red as laser pointers. “That’s Tony,” she said positively, shook my grasp off, and was up and running that way.

I followed, no less determined, but more cautious as I went. My hand was still reddened from touching Pepper’s, and I was sure the piece of rebar she snatched up from the blistered deck as she ran would probably fry the flesh off my bones. Extremis, it appeared, had taken to my friend much more effectively than to me, which was fine as long as it didn’t kill either of us. I sidestepped more flames and caught up to Pep at the line between scorched and clear space. Killian’s back was to us; his shirt was gone, and the ash that encrusted his skin drew random patterns like bizarre tattoos, black over glowing red. “No more false faces,” he rasped. “You said you wanted the Mandarin. You're looking right at him. It was always me, Tony. Right from the start. I am the Mandarin!”

Some feet away, Tony half sat, half lay on the deck—without his suit, damn it all, just street clothes. He was clutching one leg, and his bloodied face was twisted in pain and anger. Pepper planted her feet, took a solid two-handed grip on the metal rod, and swung for the fences. Killian went flying, and landed in a heap a good distance away.

Tony yelped in surprise and stared at Pepper as though he was seeing a ghost. I stepped around her left side, placing myself between her and Killian (as if I thought I could do anything to shield her, I scoffed mentally at myself; it was as much reflex as anything, I supposed) and gave her an approving nod. “Nice swing.”

She shrugged. “I played softball.”

Tony looked from her to me and back. “I got nothin’,” he finally said.

It would have been cute, if that damned Killian hadn’t chosen that moment to start trying to rise again. “Shit, you again?” I groaned. “You’re harder to kill than fuckin’ Michael Myers—”

Over the diminished snarl of the flames around us, a more recognizable roar sounded: repulsors. I looked up hoping to see Rhodey returning, but only saw a lone Iron Man suit coming in fast. “JARVIS!” Tony barked. “My twelve o’clock is not a target. Disengage!” His hand flew to his ear, and he started looking desperately around the deck where he lay. He must have had a communication device, I realized, that was lost or down.

The suit shot down from the sky with a missile’s speed, aiming straight for Pepper. I dove for her, burns be damned, and we both flattened as the incoming shot missed. Thwarted, the suit flew past and circled around to try again. I rolled off her and caught a glimpse of Killian’s scalded face, clenched in a skull’s grin of triumph and literally breathing fire, as he hauled himself up.

With both hostile and friendly fire coming at us, what to do? I was closest to Killian, so I pushed Pepper the opposite way and stood. “Cover Tony!” I said urgently. “I’ll—”

“No!” Instead of going to him, Pepper bent and shoved both her hands under my feet. “Jump!”

The next thing I knew, I was flying. My pal’s aim was amazingly good; instead of the suit coming at me head-on, I was about to pass to one side of it. Somehow, I twisted in the air, hooked one arm around it, and let gravity bring us both down. Crazier yet, I managed to land on my feet, the suit crashing to the tanker deck beside me with a metallic clang.

It would have been better if my aim was as good as Pepper’s and I could have brought the couple hundred pounds of gold-titanium alloy down on Aldrich Killian’s fool head, or what was left of it. Sad to say, I was not that good. The spectacle caused him an instant’s hesitation, though, and that gave me a chance. I charged him, putting all my adrenalin ( _and Extremis, dear Lord, if it’s in me, help me use it right now!_ ) into a two-handed blow that seared my knuckles but knocked him back a few steps.

Metal screeched behind me. I spun in time to see Pepper rip a gauntlet from the downed suit and pull it onto her arm. Everything was moving at dizzying speed, but if I was right, at this instant there was only one person on this ship who didn’t have some kind of enhancement to protect them. I dropped my head, lunged out of her line of fire, and threw myself on top of Tony. 

Something flew over my head—it looked like a piece of munition torn from the suit—pursued an instant later by a sizzle of repulsor fire and one more explosion, entirely too close. When I raised my head and blew hair out of my eyes, nothing was left of Aldrich Killian but floating ashes. _Good riddance to bad rubbish_ , I thought.

“Oh---my God,” Pepper said faintly. “That was really violent.” 

She shivered a little, her eyes still tinged red, glowing like low coals in a backyard grill. I wondered if mine looked the same, but for the moment all I felt was the backwash of an action rush. “Yeah,” I replied, and then grinned. “Kind of fun though. So what made you decide to throw me at your genius boyfriend’s killer robot suit?”

“You’re smaller than me,” she said with a cock of her head, as if it were the most logical thing in the world. “I figured you’d fly higher.”

I nodded and a slightly hysterical giggle escaped me. “Sounds legit.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aftermath of the showdown at the seaport--reunions and plans to move ahead.

The next moment, it registered that I was still sprawled over Pepper’s aforementioned genius boyfriend. I turned my attention to Tony. “Are you okay, hot rod? I didn’t hurt your—” With a gulp, I hovered my hand over his chest, just above the glow of the arc reactor. 

“Nope, nope, I’m good.” He still looked a tad gobsmacked, but his usual sass reasserted itself with a small, breathless grin. “Barely smudged my mascara.”

I rolled onto the deck and narrowed my eyes at him when he winced. “Liar,” I said fondly, stood and grabbed his hand with care; but my abnormal strength and agility of moments before seemed to have vanished as quickly and unannounced as it came.

“You did—oof—always say you’d pay me back for that night we met.” 

“This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“Yeah, well, me neither, but things change.” Tony got to his feet, favoring one leg for a second, then steadied himself. “Free piece of advice though, cornbread. Next time a strange man offers you a ride home from Vegas, don’t take it. That’s what got you into this mess to begin with.”

“Don’t worry, I promise I’ll call you instead. Wait, no, that won’t work. You are definitely a strange man.” After a quick glance at my hands (still no illumination, but I hadn’t had time to look while airborne) I reached out and he pulled me to his side with no hesitation. “I’d risk it anyway, Tony. It’s worth it. Y’all are worth it.” 

Speaking of which, I glanced over his shoulder and saw Pepper, still standing some feet away and looking very unsure. I nodded to her, gave Tony a little smile, and stepped aside to go poke with my toe at what was left of Killian while he went to her. Nosing into everything helped me stave off the rising anxiety that threatened to swamp my composure. I hated to admit it, but Tony was right. Not that I hated to admit he was right, but this _was_ a mess I was in. I was a reporter, not a superhero, but I had just done things that normal people simply couldn’t do, and I had no idea how it might end. 

With shaky hands, I pulled my hair back (with a ponytail holder that had somehow miraculously remained in my pants pocket throughout my adventures) and resolved to give my worries to my God. What the Extremis virus might do, and what might happen to me now with this stuff in my veins, was anybody’s guess, but it had left me alive long enough to help my friends; so I supposed I could die content, if it came to that.

From behind me, I heard Pepper say, “No, don’t touch me, I’ll burn you!” and Tony softly reassuring her. Then a more ominous sound reached my ears. I started, and my eyes scanned the skies even though neither of my friends reacted. The sound of repulsors here and now could be yet another rogue Iron Man suit, or…

The source swept into view and homed in on us, but not with harmful intent. Iron Patriot set down deftly on the deck, and Rhodey was out of the suit and pulling me into his arms almost before the boots were fully settled. “Hey, baby girl!”

I pressed myself to him, then pulled back just far enough to look into his dark worried eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Am—I—” he sputtered. “ _You’re_ the one who got yourself kidnapped, remember?”

“And _you’re_ the one who was rolling around pulling stunts off the outtake reel from _Lethal Weapon_ , you nut. After getting hauled out of your suit and somebody else stuck in it, and I’m terrified to even ask what led to that!”

He hugged me tightly, and I yielded and leaned against him. “And you know all this how?” he asked.

“Killian stuck me out here to watch him—execute—the guy in the suit.” I turned my head enough to locate with my eyes the ledge where I had been held. It was much higher than I had realized; the remaining Iron Man suits were hovering not much higher in the air. “I was up there,” I said with a gesture vague enough to hopefully not include the fragmented remains of the packing crate lying on the deck.

I should have known better than to underestimate Rhodey’s powers of observation. His gaze went to the area where the suit had been mounted, over to the spot I’d pointed out, then down, where, too late, I noticed no stairs led. Finally, his eyes locked with mine. “Um, Chris, did Tony get you down?”

Oh, HELL. I was not about to ask Tony to lie for me. _Good Lord, woman, you are dumb as a stump. At least you could have manufactured a vantage point with some access._ Rhodey would have to know sooner or later how I’d survived that drop, but I really did not want to get into another argument with him, especially not here, where the racket was so loud I could barely hear my own thoughts. 

Before I could formulate a reply, I was saved by Pepper’s approach, with Tony beside her; or, I thought I was saved, for a moment anyway. That moment ended when Pepper’s arm went around me. “Are we gonna be okay, Tony?” she asked.

“Well, you’re in a relationship with me, so everything will never be okay.” Tony’s snark game was back up to snuff, which was a good sign, I thought. I freed one arm from around Rhodey to reach up and clasp Pepper’s hand where it rested on my shoulder. “Chrissy has a better chance at okay. But as far as Extremis goes, I think I can figure this out. I almost had it twenty years ago when I was drunk, so now—yeah, I think I can get you both better. That’s what I do. I fix stuff.”

Rhodey looked from him, to her, back to me. “Extremis? Explanation is coming on all this, right?”

“Right,” I sighed.

Pepper half turned toward Tony. “What about your distractions?”

“Uh, I’m going to shave them down a little bit,” Tony nodded and touched his ear, where I saw a tiny earpiece now replaced. “JARVIS, hey.” A brief pause, then, “You know what to do…Screw it, it’s Christmas. Yes, yes.”

“Christmas?” I squeaked. “We lost a lot of time. And all y’all’s presents are back in my apartment.” 

“This, right here, is all the present I need,” Rhodey grinned.

Small booms and flashes of light began to appear overhead. For a beat, I thought it was fireworks, until I looked up just in time to see one of the circling suits explode. My instant’s panic vanished when Pepper’s face lit up and she practically threw herself into Tony’s arms. For his part, he looked uncertain, even a little conflicted for a moment, until she kissed him and snuggled close. “Okay so far?” he asked her, so quietly I barely heard it.

“It’ll do,” she replied. I chuckled to myself. Pepper gave as good as she got from Tony, which, I suspected, was a large part of why he loved her. The tension in his face eased, and a tired, soft smile slipped onto his lips. 

Rhodey's fingers curled around my cheek and pulled me in for one more gentle kiss; then he took a step back. “I need to go drop the suit off, and make sure everything’s being taken care of. The Secret Service should be here by now, and Mr. Ellis said he’s got plenty to tell them. Apparently Killian ran off at the mouth to him about his plans and his co-conspirators, since he figured the man would be dead in a few hours.”

“Mmm,” Tony raised his head briefly from where his face was buried in Pepper’s neck. “Sing him a few bars of Hail to the Chief for me?” 

“Wait, what?” I started putting things together, the naggingly familiar portion of a man’s face I had glimpsed in the suit, Killian’s prattle about serving up justice. “Mr. Ellis, and Secret Service…was that…” I waved my hand toward where the Iron Patriot had been strung up. “The President?

At my open-mouthed reaction, Rhodey's grin widened. “I’ll hook up with you guys as soon as I can, and we can swap stories. I’d tell you to stay here with them and out of trouble, Chris, but those two statements are kind of mutually exclusive.”

“Staying out of trouble doesn’t seem to be an option for me anymore,” I said with a cut of my eyes toward Tony, who looked frankly smug.

“Admit it, you’ve had more fun since you met me than in your entire life prior to,” he accused. Pepper swatted him and I flipped him off. “Rhodes! You’re gonna leave me alone for these Amazons to beat up on?”

“Looks like it, Tones. Man up.” Rhodey took off, with an unrepentant chortle trailing down to us like a contrail.

Tony let out a groan that tried to sound put-upon. “Manning up, here,” he said and moved with obvious reluctance out of Pepper’s embrace. “We don’t need to let the whole military-industrial complex know about you two fireballs and your little problem, or you may be getting draft letters.” I nodded vigorously. “So, before reinforcements show up, I’m going to go find all the materials on Extremis that Killian had here. That way, I can start right away on a work-around, a way to neutralize it, or kill it, or whatever.”

“Maya could help,” Pepper said, “if we can find her. She seemed torn by what he wanted her to do, unless she’s an excellent actress. She’ll have to answer to the law, of course, but the authorities might go easier on her if she agreed to help you—although that would negate the whole purpose of trying to keep Extremis a secret.”

Secretly, I suspected Maya made a habit of going with who- or whatever she thought would give her the best deal, which in this case might well be us, secrets notwithstanding. Tony grimaced, though. “I don’t know if she’s even alive. When Killian grabbed me, she tried to bargain with him to let me go. He shot her and his goons hauled her out.” He looked from my shocked face to Pepper’s. “What, did you have bonding time? An impromptu support group meeting for people who have survived putting up with Tony Stark?” He rounded on me, finger thrust out. “And _you_. I probably don’t even wanna know how you got here. As I recall, I left you to watch Happy!”

“And he was stable, and I went to help Pepper,” I retorted.

“Good thing you did, too,” Pepper put in. “For me, anyway. Not for you. I’m so sorry, Chrissy!”

She hugged me and I returned the favor. “Not your fault, girlfriend,” I murmured. “You blew the ever-lovin’ shit out of the one person whose fault it was. And did it well, I might add.” I felt a small laugh from her. “You even looked good doing it, darn you.”

“Yeah, well, before I think too much about _that_ and get inappropriately aroused, I’m going to hunt up data,” Tony put in. “You two just—sit. Talk girl talk, plot world domination, whatever.” He backed away, still talking, as usual. “If you go the world-domination route, let me know. I’ll happily submit to your benevolent but despotic matriarchy!” Pepper waved her hand at him in a go-away gesture, and he trotted off laughing.

Arms still around each other, we found a chunk of debris not smoking and stable enough to settle on, and just sat quietly for a few minutes. “How are you, Chrissy, really?” Pepper finally asked.

“I know I talk a good game, but…I admit it, Pep, I am scared. It doesn’t seem to have affected me as much as you, but still…”

She rubbed my back. “I can’t lie, I’m scared too. But Tony’s got this. I know it.”

“Yeah.” I managed to smile. “I know it too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had to throw in the Lethal Weapon line. Thanks to Shane Black, the second half of IM3 reads totally like a Tony and Rhodey buddy-cop action flick, and I just love it. 
> 
> For those of you concerned about Maya, stay tuned...
> 
> Thanks again to everybody reading, kudos'ing and commenting. I larb you. :)


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Stark finally gets clear of the war zone and starts to get their ducks in a row.

Tony returned with a laptop bag stuffed to bursting with notes and gear within minutes, about the time fire crews, dock security, and of course a news crew or two, started to arrive. Normally, I would have engaged them immediately, and been asking questions and pumping for all the info I could get. Then again, normally, I wouldn’t have been right in the middle of the action either. Drained, I just sat and leaned against Pepper, and watched Tony work his magic. I might have a bit of a gift for the written word, but my Lord, that man could talk the ear off a stalk of corn. He borrowed a firefighter’s cell, called a local SI contractor (yes, and woke the guy up) and charmed him into sending an employee with a car and a burner phone.

While we waited, Tony gave a brace of federal agents a swift and eye-popping summary of Killian’s exploits that apparently included hiring a down-on-his-luck British stage actor to impersonate the Mandarin. He had carefully not told them anything about Extremis, and allowed them to draw their own conclusions about the explosions around the country. By the time they recovered enough to start asking questions, Tony was already bundling us into the car, nudging the driver over, and waving as he drove us away. It was what Tony did well, what I had expected him to do years ago, spinning a spell of misdirection, bobbing and weaving to evade questions about the mysterious Iron Man’s identity, instead of revealing himself. 

We landed at a hotel in Miami. Tony sent the driver on his way and sent me off to get cleaned up. The suite we had been escorted to contained two plush bedrooms with lavish baths. A leisurely hot shower went a long way toward bringing me out of the mild shock I was probably in. My filthy clothes made my nose hairs curl, but I found plenty of soft towels in the bathroom, and a warm robe and a pair of slipper socks lying on the bed. They would do fine until I could…do something. My purse was back in California (if I was lucky and somebody had found it in the hotel room from which Pepper and I had been abducted), so buying clothing to get home in was not an option unless Vanity Fair would spot me some funds against the ass-kicking article I was going to write about this escapade.

“Cornbread!” Tony called. A moment later, he poked his head around the bedroom door. He was wrapped in a robe too, with the top curve of the arc reactor showing and shedding a faint blue glow, and his damp hair stuck out every which way. “Oh, good, you’re decent. Sizes?” 

I stared. “Sizes?”

“Unless you want me to guess, and I’m not historically swell at guessing things related to female clothing. Better yet, come tell Pep yourself.”

Hesitantly, I followed him out into the cool elegance of the large sitting area. Pepper was curled up in a big armchair in her own robe and socks, directing a crew of people who bustled around stocking the neat little kitchen and carrying stacks of clothing into the master bedroom. “Chrissy!” she called when she saw me. “Come tell me what your sizes are, and Ramona will bring enough things for a few days, at least until we can go shopping.”

I halted. “Um, I can probably expense an outfit to get home in, but I don’t think Vanity Fair is going to reimburse you for all this. It looks like the fanciest crib in south Florida! A ride into town would’ve been enough.” 

Tony looked utterly baffled. “I’m not expecting reimbursement, from you or that rag, excuse me, that well-respected publication that has been giving you shit of late.”

“’Rag’ is a little dramatic,” I objected. “I just don’t think I ought to let anybody see me here. They’ve ridden my ass about getting too close to y’all as it is. And it’s three AM on Christmas morning, so who wants to have to go find me clothes? I don’t want to cause you and Pep any more trouble than I already am causing.” 

“Chrissy,” Pepper sighed, as close to dramatic as she ever gets. “Remember the reporters at the seaport? It was pretty clear you were there with us, so that ship has already sailed. Besides, if Tony didn’t want you here, he would have told you so. You know he has no impulse control.”

Tony nodded vigorously, until that last bit. “Well, you didn’t have to go there, Potts. Even though it is true. But yeah, I would’ve thrown you out of the car. Maybe off that bridge we crossed on the way into town, remember the one Pep, with the alligator warning sign?”

Pepper gave him a side-eye. “You’re overdoing it,” she told him, then returned her attention to me. “Tony’s called for pizza, he pinged Rhodey on his suit’s comm to let him know where we are, and I just called the hospital and Happy is still stable.” That was great to hear. “Come on, let’s eat, and then we can get some rest.”

Tony raised his hands in surrender, and Pepper started pumping me for my clothing sizes. Three AM on Christmas morning doesn’t matter in some places, and as Pepper pointed out, her and Tony’s belongings had been lost in the attack on their house, and a billionaire and a CEO couldn’t very well run around town half naked (though Tony, naturally, begged to differ). 

Pizza arrived, followed, about the time we were stuffed, by several changes of clothing that fit me perfectly. Pepper shooed me off to bed and hauled Tony the opposite direction. I hoped that wasn’t literal steam I saw curling out her ears when he waggled his eyebrows and started to mutter double entendres about hot sex.

I wasn’t sure I was wound down enough to rest, but my head hit the pillow and I was gone. I woke only once, when a warm body slid into the bed behind me and an arm slipped around my waist. I inhaled Rhodey’s scent, sighed and went right back to sleep.

Not surprisingly, the next day didn’t start for me till almost noon. Rhodey was already out in the sitting area with Tony, their heads bent over Killian’s laptop and his papers spread all over a sizable dining table. I had slept through the free breakfast buffet, sadly, but so had Pepper. (Tony grumbled a little; apparently it featured some amazing pastries.) I assessed the kitchen status, scooted Pepper and her coffee cup aside, and started my standard crisis-coping strategy, in the form of making pancakes. “How about this?” I said to the room. “I get to cook for us all on Christmas after all. God bless us every one.”

“Amen,” Rhodey said, his voice slightly shaky as though from emotion. Pepper mm-hm’d around her coffee, and even Tony, who swears up and down he is an atheist, nodded in agreement.

Over our plates and later coffee mugs, we caught each other up. Thankfully, Pepper was only threatened by Killian with being his guinea pig-slash-trophy girlfriend. Tony had crash-landed his suit in my general part of the world, investigated the bomb blasts and found the links to Killian—the madman intended to pass his unstable experiments off as terrorist bombs and harness the citizenry’s fear as a path to power. As Pep and I had heard him say, Killian claimed to be the Mandarin, though I couldn’t see how he expected anybody to believe that. More likely, we all agreed, he had seized upon the shadowy warlord as a convenient cover for his own plot. He had told me he was using the Mandarin’s name, after all.

Rhodey’s suit had been hijacked and he’d been forced out by the Extremis goons, but he had escaped and hooked up with Tony. Together they had tracked Pepper and me down, and then, with nary a trace of armor on hand, those two maniacs had stormed the _Norco_.

I would have liked to soft-pedal the drama of my experiences, but that wouldn’t benefit me, so I shared all the facts, as simply as possible. Tony asked lots of questions, and mumbled and typed and tugged at his hair. Rhodey listened in silence, his eyes never leaving me and his mobile, expressive face frankly unreadable for once.

When I finally fell silent, Tony sat straight and slapped his hands together. “All right, ladies, you and I need to get our stories straight. Not you, honey bear,” he tossed off at Rhodey. “You’re good, as long as you can keep any reference to Extremis under your side cap. I know you don’t wanna lie to the brass, but they didn’t want my help with their little Mandarin problem, so, payback’s a bitch. I don’t need their noses in my business either. But SHIELD will roll up here any time now and want to have nice little chats alone with all of us, so let’s be sure we’re on the same page.” A look of exaggerated horror crossed his face. “Fuck, I just sounded like I was in charge of something for a hot minute there, didn’t I?”

Pepper just smiled. Rhodey gave a jerky little nod and sat quietly as we fit our accounts together. It didn’t take a lot of tweaking, and when, just as Tony had predicted, a group of calm-faced people in plain suits showed up the next morning, we were good to go. Both Pepper and I avowed we didn’t remember much due to having been drugged by our abductors. I told them I had kicked a loose board out of the crate and wriggled out, then cut the ropes (not zip ties) that bound me on a sharp edge of torn metal, and climbed down a ladder that was crushed beyond recognition minutes later by falling debris. Pepper reported she had fallen only a few feet, but out of Tony’s sight, and he had been waylaid by Killian and his minions while trying to find her. Tony and I both swore she had saved the day, so she couldn’t get out of admitting to blasting a not at all fire-breathing Killian with a crashed suit’s gauntlet. Her embarrassment was quite entertaining, and convincing. On the whole, I thought we did a good job of presenting a normal front...as normal as a battle with a delusional narcissistic mad scientist gets, anyway. What my life had become made me shake my head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If, like me, you like visual cues, here's what I picture as the hotel suite where the gals and Tony land:
> 
> https://www.1hotels.com/south-beach/retreat-collection/hotel-rooms/presidential-suite


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony lays plans to attack Extremis, Team Stark is puzzled by information from Bruce Banner, and Chrissy has an unexpected conversation with Rhodey.

When we finally got the Men in Black, as Tony called them, off our cases and on their way with their reports in hand, Tony made a declaration. “Okay. We are all officially on vacation, until after New Year’s. No arguments from anybody.”

To my numb amazement, the place we were staying was not just lush; it was the presidential suite of a five-star joint right on Miami Beach, with a view that made me ache to hit the beach. Pepper admitted the same, but both of us were uncertain about venturing beyond the safe-feeling walls of our current retreat. We had read much of Killian’s files, and Tony explained what we didn’t understand. It appeared that if we stayed calm, there was little risk of Extremis breaking loose, so we were safe out in public. Secretly, I thought my dud infection didn’t have much chance of doing anything anyway, but we kept fully charged cell phones at hand all the time just in case Pepper in particular ran into a problem.

Our first jaunts were short ones, only as far as the hotel lobby, a quiet café, or a shady cabana. Tony accompanied us on several occasions, pretending to complain all the while, but watching us both with a hawk’s eye and always within easy reach of Pepper’s hand. Her anxiety calmed before mine, weirdly enough; but then, I was stressing about keeping my job and some semblance of ‘objectivity’. Yeah, right.

That wasn’t all I fretted about. Eventually, I would have to get home and back to work. Tony put his foot down and refused to let me on a commercial plane alone, for fear, as he put it, that I might start to smolder and not in a good way. Every time I looked around, he was nose-deep in papers and notes on the virus, or running simulations of potential counteractions on the purloined laptop that he had taken pains not to mention to the SHIELD agents. He offered to call an SI jet and take me to California (and back to Florida—he was serious about this vacation thing) himself. Somehow, like an idiot, I hadn’t realized Rhodey wasn’t the only pilot in this little group. I don’t know how I thought Tony had learned to fly his suits! 

After he had a good laugh at that, he promptly took mild offense. “Stop, cornbread. If you won’t let me take you home to get your stuff, you’ll just have to let me get you some more stuff, because you’ll have to come to New York with us anyway. The lab in the Tower is better equipped for biological tinkering, even if I still had the workshop in Malibu, and besides, I’ve got my science bro there to help us, I hope—"

Just then, Pepper moseyed in from the balcony overlooking the beach, tablet in one hand and phone in the other. “How’s everything in Cali?’ Tony asked, then looked her up and down in her bathing suit and coverup, and let out an extravagant sigh. “Good look on you. Makes me consider modifying the company’s dress code.”

“No, you aren’t,” Pepper returned. “Everyone had a nice holiday, thanks in part to the generous bonuses we gave them, and they thank you very much. Mrs. Arbogast says hello. I’m in the process of wading through messages right now. Maurice, you remember him, the assistant head of security, is monitoring Happy’s condition and calling me daily with updates. And Bruce Banner has been frantically trying to get in touch with you, or me, or anybody, for several days.”

“As usual, honey, you have read my mind. How do you do that, anyway? Because it’s kind of hot and kind of scary, all at the same time. Returning your call, Brucie-bear!” While he tracked his phone down, Tony continued to chatter. I learned the Hulk’s alter ego was not only a nuclear physicist, but a brilliant biochemist as well, and that he had moved into an apartment in Stark Tower at Tony’s invitation as soon as the building was repaired after the battle there. He sounded like a good one to lend more grey matter to our problem.

While Tony talked to Bruce, Pepper and I brainstormed how to handle my employer. She and Tony had gotten wind that SHIELD had found video Killian had shot of his early Extremis experiments. That made it even more essential that not a word be breathed linking it to either Pepper or me, even though my dose had evidently been a short-lived lemon. Neither of us had any desire to play the traumatized-damsel card, but we were more than justified in openly wanting recovery time, and I decided to plead a need for companionship while I got my nerves settled. As an excuse to suddenly relocate to the Big Apple for an extended visit, it was as plausible as anything. Beyond that, we concluded the best approach was the simplest and most straightforward, concealing as little as possible. The public story would be the story we had told SHIELD, with no mention of Extremis; Killian had taken Pepper to pressure Tony, and I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tony got off the phone, wearing a puzzled frown. “Bruce tried to contact the Avengers, just in case they cared to know I was supposedly toast. Thor’s still on Asgard dealing with his crazy brother, but Captain Spangles and the assassin twins are MIA. He even left messages with SHIELD for Fury.” He shrugged. “You’d think a super-secret boy band could check their voicemails. Anyway, at least he’s glad I’m not dead. I filled him in and he’s up for helping me fix you two up. We’re thinking it should take a few weeks at most.”

I nodded. “I can work from a borrowed apartment as well as from anyplace else, for that long. Hope my savings are enough to cover the rent; I doubt my insurance will count that as an applicable medical expense.”

“Friends and family rate,” Tony replied. “Translated, no worries. You can pay me in that country fried steak thing you make. Seriously, why do you keep stressing about us paying for stuff? I don’t get it.”

I had never explained to them, but heck, with potential fiery death hanging over me, I supposed I should come clean. “Reporters really aren’t supposed to accept gifts from people we report on,” I admitted. “It’s not illegal, but it’s ethically questionable. If the magazine finds out, they’d probably fire me.”

Tony looked thoroughly nonplussed, for all of four seconds. “Their loss. We’d just hire you for SI. Or the Avengers could probably—I mean, I couldn’t make an official proffer for that, it’d have to go through Fury and he’s not likely to listen to me, but I bet Pep would give you a good recommendation.” He nudged Pepper with his knee. “Great mind, brilliant communicator, can kill a goon with a corn dog skewer; sounds like somebody the pirate king would love to snap up.”

I hid my face in my hands. “I did not kill that goon,” I muttered, “but y’all are never gonna let me live that down, are you?”

“Nope!” Tony’s tone was bright. “I think Natasha’s already told the whole team about it, in fact. Maybe she’d sign on as a professional reference.” I groaned and they laughed, and I decided maybe I ought to take this whole potential-fiery-death thing as a positive motivator. For all the years I had driven myself to make my bones as a top-tier journalist, some things were more important than ambition.

“Okay,” I said. “I ate before I got that job, and I’ll eat after it. Y’all are the best friends ever, and as my college roommate used to say, I am being an ungrateful prat.” I got up and hugged them both. “Thank you. Now, I’mma go put on that cute bathing suit you helped me pick out, Pepper, and let’s go have some fun.”

And I did. I quit bitching and feeling guilty. If Extremis might fry me at any time, I decided I’d better make the best of what days I had. We hung out on the beach, and went to a fancy restaurant or two, and I just enjoyed Pepper and Tony’s company. The media, my kin, caught on before long. A particularly aggressive reporter cornered the three of us at a diner up the block and fired the question I had been anticipating. “Everybody knows Tony Stark’s propensities. Does he have both of you women on a string?”

Pepper paled. Tony was half a second away from coming over the table and disemboweling the jerk with nothing more than a little bitty seafood fork. I was half a second away from letting him—and then the absurdity of this whole thing slammed into me like high tide, and I started to laugh. “No, no, no,” I shook my head in mock-sadness, and waved my hand at Pepper. “No such luck. She won’t share.” The very confused-looking would-be scoopster retreated, to the tune of Pepper and me clinging to each other and giggling insanely. Tony stared at me with something akin to awe. 

When photos from that dinner got online, my editor Will emailed me in a tizzy wanting to know exactly what the fuck I was doing. I responded, ::I’m letting my friends take me out to eat. Good Lord Will, I just got kidnapped by a freaking mad scientist, I think I’m entitled to some downtime and some company, and a nice meal or two that I’m not required to cook. And don’t worry, I will get the damn Mandarin article written and into your hands, and it is gonna be a doozy.::

It was a little unnerving, how easily I settled into the posh life. No, I wasn’t exactly living in a cardboard box under a bridge before, but having fancy toiletries and hand-squeezed juices delivered to your door daily was something I could get used to. Oddly, though, the cover story I had concocted to cover my temporary relocation to New York seemed to be manifesting in real life. I had lived alone since I got out of college, so I would have thought I was set in my ways and accustomed to solitude. I do love my me-time, but now I was craving the nearness of others. Even if I was just piled up in bed reading, it was a strange sort of comfort to hear them moving around in the suite, Pepper humming to herself as she worked or Tony working through some problem out loud. Maybe the ordeal I’d been through, and the uncertainty about what was to come, had left me a bit more fragile than I had thought. 

Rhodey had his own work, of course. On several occasions I spied him in the news; the Pentagon was publicly giving him the lion’s share of credit for breaking up Kiliian’s conspiracy, and arresting the Vice President for crying out loud! After the first night he stayed in the suite, however, he only flew in a couple of times for a few minutes and seemed in a hurry to leave. I knew he was busy, but after days with little contact, I began to wonder if he was actively avoiding me. He had to know Extremis wasn’t contagious. Maybe its instability set him on edge, or he didn’t like the idea of my being potentially stronger than him? or maybe he was still irked by the way we had parted, on the night of the theater explosion. We hadn’t had time to get that straight; being kidnapped interferes with so many everyday activities! I stewed about it, and finally on the afternoon of the thirtieth, I texted him. ::hey hon. Hope you’re ok. Know you’re busy. Was hoping to see you again before I have to go to NY to start my treatments.::

Message sent, I went back to work on my article. In a couple of minutes my phone pinged. ::Be down tomorrow afternoon. Need to get some time alone with you, & chat.::

That sounded—ominous? Unpromising? It didn’t help when after lunch the next day, Pepper suddenly decided she wanted to go walking on the beach and insisted Tony go with her. I sat and waited until Rhodey arrived. “How’re you doing, baby girl?” he asked while hugging me.

“I’m okay. No outbursts of super-strength or anything, since that one thing on the ship.” We settled on the big soft sofa. “If it weren’t for the little matter of spontaneous combustion, I’d be tempted to tell Tony to not even mess with the virus. It doesn’t seem to be negatively affecting me. Heck, I’ve never moved as gracefully as I did that night. As many times as I’ve stepped on your feet when you tried to take me dancing, you know better than anybody what a klutz I am.”

His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Tony still thinks he can fix it, though?”

“Oh, yeah. He calls it a deactivation protocol. It seems the virus can’t be completely eliminated from our systems but it can be basically rendered inert, forming sort of its own vaccine. He’s got Bruce on board to help him run all the tests they’ll need on Pepper and me, and then start a series of, injections, or IVs or something. I’ll have to stay in New York, in the tower, for a few weeks while that goes on, and a little while afterwards for monitoring.” He nodded and looked marginally less tense. “Rhodey, is there something I need to know? You seem so tight, and you’ve barely talked to me for nearly a week. Is this bug scaring you? Because, believe me, I don’t blame you.”

“No! Oh no, Chris, it’s nothing like that. I’m scared for you, I mean, but you’re in the best possible hands. If Tony can’t do this, it can’t be done.” I bobbed my head. “Thing is…” He took a deep breath. “Well, a couple of things. First, I didn’t have time to tell you before you were taken, but my CO called me in. They--don't want us dating. The investigation team at the theater saw me go straight to you after they questioned me, and that didn’t look good. They were concerned about your access. It’s ridiculous, but the brass are threatening me with a limited-contact order, and they can enforce it, or force me to resign. I don’t know what to do. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, to see what your thoughts were. We could sneak around; that’s sketchy as hell, at best, but I don’t want to lose you.”

I breathed through a moment of shock, then marshalled a response. “No, no sneaking. I know how much your service means to you. This is your vocation, I know that, and I will not take that from you. You serve, and you defend, and that’s part of what makes you the person I care for. Even if we have to cool our jets and not date, it’s not like we’ll never see each other again. I won’t take your calling from you, but I won’t let your commanders take you out of my life altogether, either, if you still want to be.” His face grave, he took my hands in his and kissed them. “So, the other thing?”

“It’s Extremis. Even if we didn’t have this—this censure hanging over our heads, I think that makes it too risky for us to be close right now. The upper levels have already got eyes on you, because of me. If the government finds out what’s in you two…Pep has Tony and her position as protection, should they think to try acquiring her as an asset, but deflecting their attention from you is the only way I can come up with to protect you.”

“And you want to. Protect me, I mean. More than you ought to, most of the time.”

He gave a small unamused laugh. “And more than you want me to, I know. Can’t help it though. I am who I am, you are who you are.” 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy worries that her breakup with Rhodey may hurt her relationships with Tony and Pepper. New Year's Eve leads her to start to re-examine what she wants out of life, and she and Tony talk about resolutions.

That was that, more or less. We sat and talked for a few minutes. I apologized for snapping at him before, and tried to apologize for getting him in trouble with the powers that be, until he ordered me to stop. 

When Rhodey left, it was with a soft kiss on my cheek and a promise to check in next week and help me get settled in New York. Quiet descended, and I shuffled around the suite, not quite knowing what to do. I tried to work, tried to read, wished I had some cross-stitch or something I could do with my brain on auto-pilot. Finally I landed back on the couch with wine, and jazz on the sound system, and tried to sort through my emotions.

Behind me, the door clicked, and I glanced down at my phone lying on the coffee table and realized I had been sitting for an hour. I twisted around, just in time to see Tony’s backside vanish into the master bedroom. He could just have really, really had to use the bathroom, but the way Pepper looked at me, concerned and intense and just a little guilty, said otherwise, and sent my heart sinking. “He okay?” I asked.

“Oh, oh yes, he, uh.” Her eyes fell on the half-empty glass of wine in front of me. With a small nod as if to herself, she headed for the kitchen and got herself some.

“Rhodey told you,” I said. “So you’d leave us to talk.” It made sense, and I was actually glad I didn’t have to do the telling. “And Tony’s—”

“Conflicted. He’s never not had Rhodey’s back, but now Rhodey’s hurting, and you’re hurting, and—Tony doesn’t do emotions well anyway, you know that.” Pepper sat down beside me and took a sip of her wine. 

“I do. And I refuse to make him choose between Rhodey and me, as if I could. I know he won’t kick my ass out on the street; he’s too good-hearted for that, and he doesn’t want me to go blow something up unintentionally, if for no other reason than to protect you from people finding out about Extremis before he can clear you up. I hate that he’s going to feel obligated to treat me, but it is what it is and he’s the only one who can. Rhodey’s his brother, for real, though, so…I hate the thought of losing his friendship, and yours, but I’m cool with taking the blame and staying out of his way, if that’s what it takes. I’ll—”

“No.” She said it in the same tone she took with Tony when he had some fucked-up idea that he thought was genius, and that she knew would get him hurt or get something destroyed or both. “No one is getting blamed here, and no one is taking blame. As for losing friendships—I mean, I’m not going to speak for Tony, but you’re like my sister. The way I feel about you isn’t going to change just because you and Rhodey aren’t together, and I’m pretty sure Tony won’t either.”

It was highly unlikely that I was hearing what I thought I was. Maybe Extremis was cooking my eardrums, or my brain. “I…have had to not be myself for a long time. Ever since I left home to go off to college, I felt like I had to hide to get ahead. Southerners get judged automatically just by opening our mouths, so much of the time. Up at Brown, and then out in California, I haven’t had friends who knew me. It hadn’t really occurred to me, but the night Tony and I met, the fact he accepted what I let slip of where I came from and who I was, meant more to me than, well, what I told you about before.” I cast a half-embarrassed look at Pepper, reassured by her indulgent little smile. “I didn’t realize what I had been missing until I got it back, with him and you and Happy, and Rhodey, even before we started dating, and I wanted so much to keep that...” 

Fresh air might be needed, to help me keep my emotions reined in. I stood up and started for the glass balcony doors, not going too fast; I didn’t want to seem as though I was running away. A treasonous tear or two escaped my eyes, before a hand settled on my shoulder from behind and halted me. “You are!” Pepper sounded almost angry. “Nobody is going anywhere.”

Tony’s voice suddenly burst from the master bedroom doorway. “Did he make you cry?” He stormed into the sitting area. “Nobody makes my cornbread cry, not even sour patch. I put a suit on and kicked his ass once, I’ll do it again. Well, I’ll have to build one first, but, technicality.”

“Pep and I were both there,” I pointed out and swiped moisture off my cheek. “And, technicality, but I don’t think either of us saw you kick anybody’s ass that night.”

“Only because I was drunk. And, yeah, dying. And I didn’t really want to kick his ass, anyway, I just wanted him to take the suit and go away. I wanted you all to go away and let me die in peace and not miss me.” That infamous mouth did him in, and he threw up his hands. “Damn, now look. This feelings shit’s more infectious than fuckin’ Extremis.”

I parked my butt on the back of the couch while Pepper went to him. “Awful stuff, feelings,” she concurred. “But standard equipment.”

“Non-negotiable,” I agreed. “Yes, they do suck sometimes. But no, Rhodey did not make me cry. We talked things over and we’re doing what we think works best. I…am not happy about it, but I’ll be okay. I won’t come between you and him though, Tony. If being around me makes you uncomfortable, I’ll make myself as scarce as I safely can until I’m medically clear.”

He still looked furious, but now aimed squarely at me. “He said you’d probably try this shit. Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of having more than one friend at a time, even if I’m not good at expressing all that. Feelings, again, y’know. At all.” Then he really shocked me, and conveyed the depth of his disquiet, by stomping over and grabbing my hands in his. “Hey. Look at me, Chrissy.” His eyes looked tired and sad in his handsome battered face, but hopeful too. “I got you into this mess, I am gonna get you out, okay? You told me once that I was stuck with you, and I’m holding you to it. You can’t harass me if you’re smoke. And I’ve kind of gotten accustomed to you harassing me, so.”

“So,” I echoed, and ventured a little smile that Tony acknowledged with an earnest nod. “Okay. Enough about those pesky feelings, then. What do y’all have planned for this big night?”

Tony’s face went totally blank, and I nearly fell over the back of the couch laughing. “Big night—oh shit. It is New Year’s Eve, isn’t it? Pep, plans, we have plans?”

“Haven’t had my planner handy,” Pepper said breezily. “We aren’t penciled in at any posh parties. The hotel is throwing one on the roof, though.”

“Hm.” Tony cocked his head at me, then half turned to eye Pepper. “That little shindig would instantly become the social event of the year, if Tony Stark showed up with the two sexiest women in South Florida.”

My cheeks heated up, but Pepper just smirked. “We bought party clothes, didn’t we?” she asked me.

We had, and a short time later, I found myself dancing to a funky live Latin band in a rooftop bar. The sparkly black cocktail dress and heels I wore probably cost more than half my wardrobe, and for once I did not give one single shit. I ate a little of everything on offer, had a few drinks, flirted and was flirted with. 

Eighteen stories up, we were almost on eye level with the fireworks when they began late in the evening. Instead of allowing them to make me worry about my future, I thought about Tony blowing his suits up, to show Pepper that he needed her more than them. They had headed back to the suite, so I was on my own and intended to stay that way, to give them some time to themselves.

At midnight, the sky blossomed with fiery flowers. I kissed a gorgeous Cuban boy, finished my last bourbon lemonade, and headed back for the suite with my heels dangling from my fingers. Tony was sitting on the balcony; I dropped my shoes just inside my bedroom and padded out to sit in the other wicker chair beside him. He glanced up at my quiet word of greeting, then back down at the half-full glass of whiskey in his hand. About the time I was wondering what had turned his earlier bright mood so distant, he said, “The bedcovers almost caught fire.” I smothered a little gulp. “Scared Pep pretty badly. I held onto her until she got herself under control and dozed off.”

“It’s terrible to say, I know,” I said after a long few moments of silence, “but it may be kind of a blessing she got the more efficacious dose. She has the will and the strength to control it until it’s remedied. I don’t know that I do.”

“She shouldn’t have to,” he said, more to his liquor than to me. “She doesn’t deserve this. It’s just another load of shit I dumped on her.”

“How do you figure that something somebody else did is your fault?” I sighed. 

Once again, the ice melting in his drink seemed much more interesting to Tony’s gaze than anything else. “I first met Killian on New Year’s Eve, 1999. I was in Switzerland at a conference, with Maya. That’s when I met Yinsen, too. Years later when I woke up in that cave in Afghanistan, he remembered me. I didn’t remember much of anything from that night, I was drunk as shit, still somehow managed to give a mind-expanding lecture, or so I was told later by those whose minds got expanded. Killian gave me his card, begged me to meet with him about backing his research. I told him I’d meet him on the hotel roof, and then blew him off. That tipped him over the edge, or so he said, made him desperate, willing to try anything…including Extremis, when Maya used the card he gave her to contact him, even though I’d lost interest and moved on to another shiny thing.”

“What Maya did was her own fault.” I shook my head. “Don’t take her agency away from her. Do what you do, Tony. You fix things, and you’ll fix this.”

“If I hadn’t been the jerk I was then, and I’d met Killian like I said I would, there wouldn’t be anything now to fix. He said I don’t deserve Pep, and it’s the only thing he got right—"

“I wouldn’t repeat that in her hearing if I were you,” I interrupted him gently. “Don’t presume you know Pepper’s mind better than she does. I suspect that wouldn’t end well for you.”

I punctuated the mild reprimand with a little smile. Tony blinked and looked briefly bemused. “Valid point,” he conceded. “But it’s bad enough I opened my big fucking mouth, and lost my house and my bots, and almost lost Pepper, and you, and even Happy. He’s so—faithful, you know? Another one I don’t deserve, and now he’s hanging by a damn thread, because the military brass wanted to sling their dicks around and bring the Mandarin in themselves. Avengers didn’t want me, apparently the Pentagon doesn’t either.” I tried to call bullshit, but his words ran me right over. Sometimes, Pepper once told me, Tony’s normal state of babble spilled out some very painful things. “So I made a decision—sort of a decision, because Pep’s right, my impulse control really does suck ass—that if I couldn’t go after the Mandarin, I’d call him out, make him come to me.” He tossed back the rest of the whiskey. “Look how fucking well that turned out. Never again. From now on, I take the fight to the other guy, no matter where. I won’t risk—” His voice faltered. “I won’t risk my world again. And you, you wouldn’t even be in a position to get into trouble if I weren’t selfish enough to want to pull you into my orbit and keep you here. I haven’t had many friends who didn’t want something. You’re just the reverse, you keep _not_ wanting things from me, and how does that even make sense?”

My mind went back to the night I first met Tony Stark, when I’d wondered what lay behind that brittle fake smile. After these years, I knew; he was protecting a heart so big and true it could lift up the planet, if only he didn’t tear it out trying to fix everything he had convinced himself he’d broken. “If wanting to hold onto your friends is selfish, make room for me in that boat. God blessed me with the ones I needed, starting when I met you.” I rose from my chair and alighted on the arm of his, slipped one arm around his shoulders and laid my other hand over his. The arc reactor’s light, filtering through his t-shirt, cast wavy shadows of the empty glass he still held, onto the low table top in front of him. “Pepper believes in you,” I told him. “I believe in you. Maybe your New Year’s resolution ought to be for _you_ to believe in you.”

He snorted. “I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s resolutions imply there’s something wrong with me that can be corrected in a year.”

“Heaven forbid anybody think that.” When I squeezed his hand, he looked up at me and smiled, the real smile, the one that made his eyes light up and crinkle at the corners. “Start with a simple one, like _get some sleep_.” I patted his back, plucked the glass from his hand and set it on the table. 

After I peeked in on Pepper, who looked blissfully sacked out, and hugged Tony good night, I took myself off to my space. Cleaned up and tucked into bed, I thought about resolutions. The amount of me that I had shucked off or left behind while clawing my way up the ladder of claimed success startled me, now that I looked back and saw it. As I fell asleep, I made my own resolution, to reclaim as much of it as I could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes a lot of my personal headcanons! For one thing, I have never been convinced Tony was quite as drunk during the party in IM2 as he acted, or else he couldn't have fought and fired as precisely as he did. I've always thought he'd given up by that point, and decided to push the people who loved him away, in hopes his death might then not hurt them. (yeah...right, Tony.) He conveniently decided to blurt that out in this chapter. Thanks, hot rod.
> 
> Writing this story made me ponder an episode in IM3 that sparks a lot of speculation: why Tony called the Mandarin out, knowing it left him and Pepper vulnerable, knowing as few people do what weaponry can do in the wrong hands. Most comments I've heard simply write it off as Tony's notorious lack of impulse control, and yeah, that probably was part of it. But right in the middle of this chapter, in the balcony scene, he suddenly started to explain himself: enraged by Happy's injuries, yet forbodden to go after the perpetrator, he took a risk to get the Mandarin to come to him. Makes sense.
> 
> But THEN, it hit me--could this be why, or at least part of the reason why, in Infinity War Tony is so adamant he is taking the fight to Thanos? Could it be because he let his foe bring the fight to him, this time, and it almost cost him everything?
> 
> God, I love Marvel. Almost every time I watch a MCU film, I see something new, and some way that the earlier films tie in to the later ones, set up storylines that pay off down the road. It's just amazing.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pepper and Chrissy reunite with Maya, before Team Stark take a run to the West Coast, and then head for New York.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a light-ish chapter, and I hope it may fill a need after yesterday and THAT DAMNED TRAILER. 
> 
> (speaking of which, I spewed some thoughts about said trailer on my tumblr, one of which elicited several requests for an extended treatment. So I immediately banged out a short fic where Tony's message from space is received, and Pepper and Carol Danvers lead a rescue mission. It's in my Works, if you are interested; called The Only Way Forward. I think it turned out pretty well, for something I wrote in a white hot blast in like 3 hours because the muse had me by the short hairs. lol)

In that way Tony has of finding out things nobody is supposed to know, he found out Maya was alive, and in the hospital recuperating before being transferred to jail. He had already gone to see her, of course, and had a nice chat, but the day before we left south Florida, Pepper and I visited.

“I can’t tell you both how sorry I am,” Maya said from her position propped up in her bed. She looked tired and worn, but I supposed getting shot in the chest and collapsing a lung would do that to a body.

“I believe you,” Pepper nodded where she sat. “Obviously, that doesn’t make what you did right, or mean you don’t have to face the consequences, but yes, I do believe you got in over your head.”

“Aldrich lied to me, all along. I didn’t know what he was doing with my work, that he was using it for fake terrorist attacks, or...I thought he was bluffing, about using you both as test subjects; that he’d threaten that to get Tony to help us. When I realized he just wanted what he could get out of Tony, and then he—he intended to kill him, I tried to stop him. It was pure luck that he missed most vital organs when he shot me; or maybe he just wanted to enjoy letting me bleed out.” Maya fumbled around on the over-bed tray-table, and I moved her glass of water closer. After a few swallows, she looked up at me, standing on the opposite side of the bed from Pepper. “I hope you can forgive me, Christine, or at least not hate me. You didn’t ask for this.”

“No, I didn’t. But like you, I’m a grown-up, and I make my own decisions and live with them. Excusing what you did to my friends—that’s not coming from me anytime soon. Maybe you’ve learned something though, and you’ll do better.”

Maya laughed a little and then winced. “Tony said Extremis needs to be kept confidential, while he stabilizes and reverses it in you two, and he’s right. I hadn’t told the police or federal agents about it anyway. He’s going to put in a good word for me, so I can get placed in a lesser-security facility; then if he needs help with the virus, he can call me. It’s not enough to make up for what I allowed to happen, to you and to the people who died at Aldrich’s hands, but it’s a start.”

With that settled, we parted on good terms, or the best we could, and I ended up on an SI jet headed west after all. Pepper had to get things out there in line to move her base of operations to New York. Happy was recovering, but not well enough to be transferred cross-country just yet, so his care had to be arranged. Tony spent the time digging through the wreckage of his house and salvaging an operational suit, so he could dive for one bot who had gone into the water, before commissioning a recovery team to rescue what non-classified type stuff they could. 

While all that was going on, I packed up what I would need for my East Coast stay and finished putting my cover story in place. Surprisingly, my apartment manager Juanita understood immediately. Back in Central America, she confided, her cousin had been held by drug dealers for a week, and for months afterwards, waking up alone had sent him into a tizzy. Trauma, I discovered, was easier to plead to others than being stuck with a crazy human-engineered virus that might make me explode at any time would have been. It made me feel a little guilty, until I reminded myself I actually had been through a traumatic experience, so I decided maybe I was entitled to a small freak-out on occasion.

On the flight to New York, I shared my insight with Pepper, and after she threatened to smack me upside the head, she hauled me to the plane’s (much smaller than previous version) bar and we shared a small mutual freak-out. Tony had his own freak-out when he surfaced from a lengthy session with his StarkPad and found us working over a bottle of scotch in the middle of the afternoon. In all fairness, I did point out that it was getting later the farther east we went. That was when he gave up and took the bottle for himself. (None of us got plastered; we just took the edge off, something all three of us honestly needed.)

Before we landed, I gave Pepper and Tony their Christmas presents. Over their objections, I pointed out these were really just what my mama would have called remembrances, small tokens. Pepper’s was a floaty silk scarf dyed in soft greens by an artist at the farmers’ market near my apartment, and a tiny handwoven bag filled with perfume samples mixed by a friend of mine who runs a small business online. She laughed at the little vials with names like Bewitched, White Rabbit and The Red Queen (and especially the one called Pepper!), then excitedly started to pop them open and sniff.

Tony tried to snatch them away and smell too. To distract him from spilling fragrance all over the carpet, I waved a flat package at him, and he grabbed it instead and tore into it like a kid. He gasped, and then laughed so hard he had to sit down, clutching the frame and staring at it. At Pepper’s puzzled head tilt, he spun it around to reveal the anime-style cross-stitch of himself, in his suit without helmet. “Damn, look at the detail,” he marveled. “The smirk’s even right. Who does stuff like this?”

“Um, in that case, I did,” I admitted. It’s the only craft skill I have, and a piece of Aida cloth and some skeins of floss are easy to stuff in the corner of a suitcase for downtime sanity maintenance when chasing down a story.

His mouth opened and closed a couple of times with no accompanying audio. “I didn’t give you anything,” he finally said in an uncharacteristically small voice.

_You’re giving me my life back,_ I thought but did not say. Instead, I gently teased, “The rare honor of seeing you speechless is enough of a gift for me.”

He still looked rather like he had taken a two by four to the skull. “Nobody’s ever made anything for me before.” My brief attack of inadequacy vanished at the naked wonder in his tone. Tony wasn’t disappointed; he seemed… _overwhelmed,_ by my goofy little gift. “I mean, I’ve paid to have suits tailored, or whatever, but not—and it’s Iron Man, so it’s not like you would have made it for anybody else but me, and you used your hands and your brain to create it so you’re part of it, sort of, not literally of course, unless you poked your finger and bled on it, which is gross, but that aside, it’s—” 

I flicked a glance toward the bar. Pepper sat on a stool, her gifts lying on her lap, and watched Tony sputter, with a hint of a smile curling her lips. “You’ll definitely never see another one just like it, even if they use the same pattern,” I told him. “I’m happy you like it.”

A little grin tugged at his cheeks. “Yeah,” he said, quietly but with a certainty that warmed my heart. “Yeah, I really like it.” He let out a breath and hopped up, still holding the frame close. “Well! We should almost be there, I’ll go take over to land. Dammit, wish I’d stolen a quinjet, we could’ve landed right on the tower deck, instead of having to schlep our stuff into a rented limo, didn’t realize how much I missed Happy…” The grumbles were muffled as the cockpit door closed behind him.

Pepper’s smile widened. “I told you he’d love it.”

“I ought to know better than to doubt you.” We located our coats (New York in January is light years from California or Florida) and moved to regular seats with belts as the jet banked. Below us, Manhattan glimmered in the late afternoon sunshine. I’d visited several times on assignments, but never spent more than a few days there. I was torn between excitement and nervousness, and the balance tipped a little toward the latter when another thought came to me. “Is coming back here going to be okay for Tony? I mean, his anxiety…”

“I hope so,” she said after a few moments of quiet. “He hasn’t had an attack, as far as I know, since before Happy got hurt. I’m still trying to get him to talk to somebody, but as he says, who do you talk to about being traumatized by invading aliens?” Her blue eyes were grave when they met mine. “For that matter, who do you talk to about being taken and used by mad scientists? Who do I talk to, who do you talk to?”

“Each other, I guess, at least for starters. Maybe being back near the other Avengers, he can talk to them; that would help. Are they around much, other than Dr. Banner?”

“Not right now. When we rebuilt after the invasion, Tony and I designed floors for each of them, plus a common area, but none of the others have moved in yet. The lower floors are SI, and above those are residential spaces—a lot of our New York staff live there. The Avenger floors are above that, and secured. Your floor is up there, with us.” Amused, I started to point out she meant room, or maybe suite, rather than floor, but we started landing before I could. 

A leisurely limo ride later (because New York traffic never moves fast), we debarked in a basement garage beneath the tower. The hired chauffeur kept giving me looks as he unloaded our bags. I sighed and pushed aside the thought that my taking up residence in Stark Tower might soon be public knowledge. _For crying out loud, girl, the Daily News isn’t going to care! You aren’t that important._ Tony and Pepper were, though, and I hoped it wouldn’t hurt them. I was more concerned with clearing my body of its unwelcome invader; then I’d worry about my public image, such as it was.

On the elevator ride up, I was thrilled to hear JARVIS’ familiar voice greet us. I hadn’t asked, but I should have figured Tony wouldn’t have risked losing his faithful AI. “Common level, J,” Tony told him, then added to me, “We’ll give you the fifty-cent tour before your floor. If you want to, I mean, unless you’re starving or about to drop. There’s a terrific pizza place a couple of streets over that delivers.” 

“No, I’d love to see everything! Before ‘my floor’,” I added with arched eyebrow. Clearly this was an inside joke between him and Pepper, so I’d be happy to play along. 

The two things that struck me when the doors opened were the incredible view of dusk over the city, as seen through a wall of windows to one side, and the glorious smell of cooking curry coming from a phenomenal kitchen on the opposite side. Bruce Banner came out with dishtowel in hand and a smudge of what looked like turmeric on one cheek. Tony greeted his science bro with his usual gusto. Pepper expressed surprised gratitude. Bruce looked abashed. “Cooking relaxes me,” he said. “Helps me think. And I know we want to get started on this Extremis deactivation as soon as possible, so putting my thoughts in order over a pot of tikka masala seemed appropriate.”

The tour was deferred while we ate; the Avengers’ common floor featured a huge dining table in another room, but we gathered around a cozy smaller one in the big kitchen. Tony and Pepper caught Bruce up on the rest of our adventure, and I got acquainted with the shy but friendly scientist. I sensed we would get along just fine, other than my mild embarrassment when Tony showed him my cross-stitch (he had barely put it down long enough to eat) and raved.

After we cleaned up, Bruce tried to politely adjourn to his floor for his usual evening routine of meditation and early bedtime. “Sleep is for the weak,” Tony scoffed. “Way too long since I’ve gotten my hands dirty. Come on, Brucie-bear, let’s go science some shit up! Night girls!”

I giggled with Pepper, then suppressed a yawn as Tony dragged his partner in crime toward the elevator. “Tour tomorrow?” Pepper asked with an understanding look. I nodded. “Come on, I’ll show you your floor.”

This might be the time to gently indicate the joke about ‘my floor’ had run its course, but I was in no mood to be mean. As it turned out, that was a good thing, because the elevator rose and opened, and Pepper stepped out, pointing and talking. “Your kitchen is over there, and the living room is there—the TV signal comes through a Stark Industries satellite, I think it has every channel known to humankind—feel free to move things around, Tony expects you to personalize.” I trailed in her wake down a short hallway. “Here’s your bedroom, JARVIS had your bags sent straight here so you can get out what you need for tonight and settle right in.”

The room was done in shades of grey, with pops of a soft red that reminded me of a weathered old barn; the bed was huge and looked deliciously comfy, and the bathroom was even better than the Miami hotel’s. “This is wonderful, Pep. Thank you. Now, how many people share the main areas on this floor? I don’t want to wake strangers accidentally.”

My friend frowned. “I told you this was your floor. Tony did too, I thought.” At my open-mouthed silence, she said, “Did you think we were kidding?”

“Um, yeah?”

Pepper answered without a word, simply with an elaborate roll of her eyes. “Good night, Chrissy. See you in the morning. I'm pretty sure Tony had _your_ kitchen stocked,” she added with an emphasis that was clearly deliberate, “but if you prefer, I’ll meet you on the common floor for breakfast.” She swept out like the force of nature that she was. Slowly, I moved to a wall draped in cloth, and parted the curtains to reveal a breathtaking view of midtown. What I had been through, and what I was facing, should seem like a nightmare, but at the moment, looking out at the galaxy of twinkling city lights, it felt more like a dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Visual aids department--here's the cross stitch Chrissy made for Tony. https://imgur.com/gallery/auHN5b3
> 
> And the perfumes she gave to Pepper really exist, they are the best in the multiverse, and can be found at www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com. :)


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gals begin their treatments to clear Extremis, and Chrissy gets acclimated to living in the tower. Tony and Bruce science more shit up, they make a new discovery, and Tony comes up with a surprising way to test it.

When morning came, I did go to the common floor to meet Pepper for breakfast. Tony was there too, with his face buried in an enormous mug of coffee. He looked like he had been up all night, and when he saw me come in, he whined, “Biscuiiits? And gravyyy?”

“If you could harness the weapons potential of those eyes, hot rod,” I told him while I sifted flour, “you’d put the world’s militaries out of business.”

Bruce magically appeared about the time the sausage was cooked. In his travels around the world (which he didn’t explain, but which sounded suspiciously like he was on the lam), he had learned cookery from a huge assortment of cultures; but he had never spent much time in the American South, and was thrilled when I offered to swap recipes.

The light mood turned more sober after eating, when Pepper and I went with the guys to the lab to start our tests. If I had been impressed by Tony’s workshop in California, the laboratory in the tower blew my hat in the creek. Everybody howled when I said so, too. I was finding the ability, locked away within myself, to say blatantly Southern things just to entertain them. Entertainment, I suspected, was going to be sorely needed in the weeks that followed.

For hours we were poked and drained and put through all sorts of paces. Not a spark appeared from me, no matter what stress test I performed. In every way other than the observable presence of the Extremis virus in my bloodstream, I seemed completely normal. Pepper, on the other hand, could elevate the temperature of her hands within a minute or two, and when that sent her into a paroxysm of fear, they threatened to spiral out of control. Tony had to call his suit gauntlets and put them on to clasp her hands in his and calm her down. Bruce looked concerned, and declared the protocols needed to be started ASAP on both of us.

Our days fell into a routine. Pepper and I spent our mornings in the lab hooked up to receive lengthy transfusions of a cocktail of proteins that Bruce had engineered to recognize the genetic signature of Extremis. He rattled on about things like homing endonucleases and cleaving DNA segments. I didn’t completely understand, but I thought I had the basic concept. “So the idea,” I said cautiously, “is to introduce mutations into it that’ll cripple it before it can fully bond with our normal cells. By the time the full course of treatment is run, the virus should be nonfunctional.”

Bruce stopped, and blinked, and took his glasses off and cleaned them and put them back on, never once breaking eye contact with me. “Yes!” he finally exclaimed. “That’s exactly it.” He wagged a finger at me. “You’re good.”

“Told you,” Tony piped up from where he was bent nearly double over some gadget he was tinkering with. “Words. They’re her superpower.”

The guys weren’t sure how fast Extremis might mutate on its own, thereby escaping their targeted weapons, or even if it would; and they had to be certain they weren’t causing toxic side effects to our systems. Hence daily blood work, and full body scans weekly, became part of our regimens. Bruce was cheered by the results he began to see, and hopeful the protocol could also help treat and cure other viral diseases. Tony encouraged him to publish and take the credit since that was more his field. 

When they weren’t treating us, the guys spent most of their time in the lab. Pepper had a company to run, of course. I worked on my Mandarin piece, and after submitting it to Vanity Fair, I took several freelance writing gigs I could do without leaving the tower. Tony felt sure it would still be safe for me, and likely for Pepper as well, to get out in public; but we had an unspoken mutual agreement to stick together until our treatments progressed. After her incendiary incidents, Pepper was understandably more hesitant to venture out, and my presence seemed to calm her, so stay I would.

I stayed more than busy, though. For one thing, I got conscripted by SI’s public relations department to help wrangle the media to-do surrounding the Mandarin incident. Tony wanted to put me on the payroll, but I was still trying to maintain some semblance of journalistic independence, so I declined. It wasn’t easy, and took some effort to convince him I was doing the work simply because I wanted to. Hurt feelings were not something I ever intended to cause him. He was giving me room and board, after all, so I told him I was treating this as a barter gig.

The floor where I was staying was in many ways my perfect nest. One room had been fitted out as work space, with blazing fast wifi, high-end hardware and a desk that was actually comfortable to sit at. The kitchen was a religious experience. It was laid out just like Tony’s old one in Malibu, expansive, yet with everything conveniently spaced. I asked JARVIS to order some things I needed and wanted (Penzey’s Spices got a big order to replace the jars I’d lost) because I figured even if I was only going to be there for five or six weeks, they should be pleasant ones.

I explored the tower too, venturing out onto the landing pad near the peak (Tony preferred to call it the party deck) to sit and marvel at the city far below. The floors Tony and Pepper had designed for the other Avengers were closed off, but Pep showed me the blueprints, and they were amazing. Tony’s generosity shouldn’t have surprised me, after all he had done and was doing for me, but it did. What really boggled my mind was that of them all, only Bruce had seen Tony’s reaching out for what it was, and had reached back. From what Pepper told me, the rest of the team hadn’t even acknowledged Tony’s messages inviting them to come check the place out, and Bruce had tried again and again to contact them since our arrival without success. Tony refused to even try, just waved a hand and mumbled something about him only being support staff. I swallowed my anger at what felt like a grave disrespect to my friend, and let it go. It wouldn’t do to waste energy on something I could do nothing about.

A lot of the time, I found myself in the lab, even when I was not receiving a treatment. Pepper liked my company, so I sat with her during her treatments and distracted her with whatever craziness I’d found online. Fortunately, my presence in the gossip round was minimal; for all the TV news interviews I had done, my face wasn’t that well-known. When she was working, I often followed Tony and Bruce around like a duckling, listening to them talk science. Even the stuff I half understood (or less) gripped my attention. Bruce was baffled until I explained I had always been a science geek. 

The great English writer Samuel Johnson said nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged, and he was so right. Thinking you might be about to die has a marvelous way of clearing the junk out of your thought processes and making you focus on what’s important. Sometimes I wondered if Tony had felt this way, back when his arc reactor was killing him. In the same way that I hadn’t realized how much I had missed having true friends until I had them and then thought I might lose them, I realized now how much I missed not being able to follow the science that had always captivated me. For now, I needed to keep the gig I had, but I began to think about finding some way to combine science and my knack for words. I set that aside in a safe spot in the back of my mind, and resolved to return to it later, but I knew if I could find or make such a position, it would be my happy place.

Since I was also good at staying out of the way, the guys didn’t voice any complaints about my hanging around. I watched and listened and asked questions about the deactivation protocol; by the beginning of the second week I was monitoring my own treatments, and by the end, I was monitoring Pepper’s too. By the third week, Bruce was starting the IVs, but I was doing everything else. He and Tony loved that, because it freed them to science some more shit up. 

One afternoon, after I had been promoted to cleaning duty (the stuff Tony’s bots usually did, except that they were out in California getting cleaned and refurbished after their terrible experience in the explosion of the Malibu house) I heard excited yells from across the lab. This, naturally, left me with no choice as a responsible journalist but to go see what was going on. Tony and Bruce were standing over an odd small device on a countertop, with a nozzle hanging from its scaffold-like framework. On its metal base lay a chunk of some white-ish material. Both men were talking over each other and grinning like goons. “This could be it,” Bruce was saying. “It copies all the structural and functional aspects of natural bone—”

“Load bearing capacity meets required criteria, but the percentage of porosity’ll allow for adequate blood perfusion—” Tony added.

“—and since it’s bioactive, those seed cells will allow for it to eventually be replaced by natural bone—”

“—which naturally, will do everything bone does!” Tony threw his hands in the air and whooped. “I knew you could do this, you damn genius.”

“Me? You worked up all the parameters—”

“But you’re the biotech wizard! You did all the tweaking I’m not trained to do.” Tony caught sight of me then and grabbed my wrist. “Check this out, cornbread.” He thrust the pale sample into my hand. It was smooth and cool on the outside, honeycombed with tiny spaces in the middle, and felt sturdy and resistant to a squeeze. “3D printing,” he said proudly. “Not much of this going on yet, other than here, of course, because we are the best.”

“Artificial bone?” I turned it over in my hands, stunned. “That can be absorbed and become real bone? This is amazing, guys.”

“Naturally.” Tony got that smug look that people want to slap off his face if they don’t know him. I’d reached the point where I thought it was kind of adorable, at least some of the time. As I’d told Happy, I was sunk. “Going for human test in a few weeks, Brucie-bear? I’ve got a volunteer ready to go, as soon as the girls are squared away.”

It wasn’t until a few days before the test that I learned the identity of the synthetic bone’s test pilot. After several more rounds of scans and blood work, Pepper and I returned to the lab to the welcome news that all results indicated the remains of Extremis in our systems had mutated into inactivity. That was when Tony told Pepper the volunteer was him. He was planning surgery for himself, to remove the shrapnel near his heart, and the arc reactor, and replace the missing bone in his chest with his newly created substitute.

“This is why I waited until you were in the clear!” he yelled as she started to rant. “Well, part of the reason. Now when your head’s exploding, it’s only figurative again. I won’t even have to go into the hospital—we’ll christen the medical wing here in the tower. You know I’ve pimped it out, it’s as good as any full-sized hospital anywhere, and I already talked to a heart specialist I know, Dr. Wu. He’s the best there is, and he’ll bring his team from Shanghai and work me over right here. I can sleep in my own bed, you can wait on me hand and foot—” The growl that tore from Pepper’s throat was barely human. “Okay, no waiting hand and foot then, we can take that off the table, no longer part of the negotiation. Honey!” He caught her shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and don’t tell me you haven’t. The way you look at this…” He tapped the arc reactor’s transparent cover. “I know it bothers you, sometimes, it worries you. It bothers me too. I hate having to rely on mechanics to stay alive. It’s taken a while, and Bruce’s help, but now I’ve got it worked out, the synthetic bone works, and I’ll be good as new. Please don’t tell me you don’t want—because I—”

“I do!” Pepper half yelled and half sobbed, throwing her arms around his neck. “I do, Tony. The thought of something in your body that could creep in and—and take you from me, at any time is—it’s something I don’t think about. And knowing the reactor is all that’s preventing it, and knowing that if something happened to that—or someone happened—” She shuddered. I caught a hint of a shiver through Tony’s own body as he pulled her close, and wondered with a sudden chill of my own if somebody had tried to attack him that way. “You just can’t spring things on me like this.”

He rubbed her back and looked utterly at a loss. Poor Bruce looked like he wanted to crawl under the nearest furniture. “She’s right,” I told Tony. “You could have told her sooner, you doofus.”

“Can’t argue any of that,” he mumbled. “Neither my epic bad timing, nor the fact that I am a total doofus. You’ll stay and help her, right? You need to stay a few weeks so Bruce can run some more checks, anyway.”

“Of course I will. But you’re still a doofus.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In our verse, 3d printers are beginning to be used to create artificial bone implants! This article was a valuable resource to me in making that element of the story halfway accurate.  
> http://www.3ders.org/articles/20141014-australian-scientists-develop-3d-printed-synthetic-bone-substitute.html  
> It was written shortly after the time period when this story would fall in the MCU verse, so it's not unreasonable to expect that the science bros could have figured it out before that. :)
> 
> In IM3, Tony goes to Dr. Wu in Shanghai for his surgery (watch the scene closely & you see the Chinese characters written on the glass surrounding the surgery suite), but given the altered sequence of events in this verse, I let Dr. Wu and his team come to the tower instead.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony goes into surgery, and Pepper makes some phone calls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wherein we begin to learn the multiple sides to the story; heh, heh...In other words, this is not a hating fic. You may have gotten that impression, understandably, but remember with a first person narrator, we only know what they know, and there are things Chrissy and Team Stark didn't know, until now.
> 
> To make it easier to see who is saying what, the lines spoken by the person on speaker phone are in italics.

Tony still wouldn’t let Pepper try to contact the Avengers. She was honestly appalled. “Maybe the military didn’t want them involved in the Mandarin incident, so you think your going missing and almost getting yourself killed wasn’t relevant to them, which for the record, I’m not buying. But not even you can make a case that it’s irrelevant to your team that you’re about to have open-heart surgery!”

“They’re not my team,” Tony replied with his usual false carelessness. “Shouldn’t matter to them.”

“It kills me to hear him say that,” she growled to me later. “Not that I _like_ him flying all over superhero-ing, exactly, but he’s going to do it anyway. He needs to do it, and I get that, and it seems safer if he has a team to work with, you know? Maybe he’s right, though. Maybe they don’t care. You’d think Captain America would give enough of a damn about the man who saved New York to make a phone call when he heard Tony was supposedly murdered! It was all over the news for those days; there’s no way he didn’t know, even if Bruce couldn’t contact him.”

I had to agree. They say, don’t try to meet your heroes, because you’ll almost invariably be disappointed. Captain America had never really been one of mine. I’d never been big on war stuff, long before I went to a progressive college and got on the peace train; but from my admittedly limited experience, I had to concede that compared to the golden-boy ideal held up for decades, the real Steve Rogers seemed a first-rate disappointment.

Despite trying literally until Tony was rolled into the operating suite, Pepper could not coax him to relent. He did ask Bruce, an ‘actual Avenger’, to call Nick Fury, and advise the head of SHIELD that his ‘consultant’ was going to be out of commission for a while. Bruce hemmed and hawed, until we were all booted out into the hallway so Tony could be prepped. “I, um, don’t much like talking to Fury, especially not alone. I always feel like I might go Code Green at any minute,” he explained, before he ducked back into the surgical suite to give some last-minute tips to Dr. Wu on the use of the synthetic bone that would replace Tony’s sternum.

Pepper, Rhodey and I stood at the observation window, holding hands, and watched the medical team gather around Tony lying on the operating table. He glanced over and gave us a thumbs up just before the nurse anesthetist put him under. “God, guide the doctor’s hands and the nurses’ care,” I breathed as Bruce rejoined us. “Give Tony sweet sleep, gentle waking, and ease from pain.”

“Yes, Lord,” Rhodey agreed.

 _“Om shanti shanti shanti_ ,” Bruce murmured, then flushed when I looked over at him. “It’s a Hindu prayer for peaceful mind, calm action and good health.”

"Amen to that," I agreed.

“I need one of those chants too, right about now, Bruce,” Pepper said, and landed in a chair in the comfortable sitting area after a nurse closed the curtains in the OR. “Because I’m about to call Nick Fury.”

“You want to be alone, or should we make popcorn?” I asked. Rhodey poked me and I stuck my tongue out at him, silently thankful that we weren’t awkward when together. 

“Please, stay here,” Pepper replied, dialing. “In fact—” She tapped her phone a few times, then laid it on the small table in the center of the sitting area as the speaker began to ring. “I’ve set it for voice activation, but on a moderate level, so as long as you keep anything you say low, it shouldn’t pick up. Credible witnesses might be useful.”

“I’m just at a loss,” Bruce said in a quiet aside to me, while Pepper politely demolished a SHIELD receptionist or two. “Every time I called, whoever I got wouldn’t put me through to Fury, or give me contact information for Steve.” 

“This may turn out differently,” I grinned at him. “You haven’t yet had the privilege of watching Pep in action, have you? Sit back and enjoy the show.”

“Director Fury.” The soft, reassuring voice Pepper had used with Tony minutes before was gone with the wind. She was crisp now, and all business. “This is Virginia Potts. There are some matters I need to go over with you. I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

 _“Miss Potts!_ ” the booming voice of the man I had met on the road in Malibu came through the phone speaker. “ _No trouble at all. Pleasure to hear from you. Allow me to extend my sympathy on your recent unpleasantness. Our agents briefed me after they returned from Miami. I trust you’re all well?”_

“Yes, thank you, although some help with the situation would have been welcome.”

_“Huh. Were you aware that Stark left a message asking that SHIELD not get involved in his conflict with the Mandarin?”_

“What?” Pepper frowned. “No. Absolutely not. When did that happen?”

Long pause. _“I realize as CEO of Stark Industries, you have security clearance, but I don’t believe your level is adequate for me to allow you access to that information—”_

 _“I_ don’t believe your security is adequate to keep _any_ information from me, Director, if it concerns Tony.”

I smirked. “Vicious,” Rhodey said approvingly. Bruce looked silently impressed.

Another lengthy silence ended with a dark chuckle. “ _Coulson told me once that whatever clearance Stark had, you should have the same, because he’d tell you everything anyway. I didn’t listen to him then, but I’m thinking now that he was right, and not exclusively for that reason. Fine. The message was conveyed to me about the time Stark’s home came under attack_.”

Pepper was silent for a few moments, before she regained her composure. “Thank you for sharing that with me, Director. I’d like a copy of that message. I can promise you that your confidence will not be misplaced.”

 _“You have a stellar reputation, Miss Potts. I’ll get that for you. I have faith in your discretion. Now, I don’t believe we have yet addressed the matters you spoke of?_ ”

“No, we haven’t. Tony asked that you be notified that he’ll be—out of pocket for a while. He’s undergoing surgery as we speak, and will not be available for any consulting assignments.”

_“I see. Might I inquire as to the problem?”_

“He’s having the shrapnel near his heart removed. And the arc reactor.”

“ _I…see_ ,” Fury repeated. That in itself conveyed his surprise. “ _Well. This is new. We’ll have to examine whether and how this change will impact his work with SHIELD and the Avengers. A little advance notice would have been nice.”_

“Tony didn’t indicate there should be any disruption in his ability to be Iron Man. And honestly, he didn’t think it would matter to anybody there, since he’s not a part of the Avengers team.” Unmistakable bitterness edged Pepper’s tone. 

Bruce said softly to me and Rhodey, “I went to Fury about that, with Thor and Clint, right after New York. After what Tony did, taking that nuke out, it wasn’t right, unless he wanted it that way. Fury wouldn’t tell us a thing.”

Pepper was still talking. “He didn’t even want me to ask for contact numbers for the other Avengers, which I suppose was for the best, since you didn’t even return Dr. Banner’s calls, or honor Bruce’s requests to inform his teammates that the man who saved their lives was missing and presumed _dead_.” 

Her voice got softer and softer, and frankly, I was a little surprised that I didn’t see literal venom dripping from a corner of her mouth. “Fury better be damn grateful she’s not in the same room with him right now, and that Tony cleared Extremis from her system,” I murmured. “Otherwise, that man would be ash.”

_“Um, forgive me, Miss Potts, but you’ve lost me there. You are correct that nobody at SHIELD would have handed you phone numbers for Captain America; but if Bruce Banner wanted to get in touch with them, or with me, of course that wouldn’t be questioned.”_

Bruce cocked his head in obvious puzzlement. “Apparently that directive didn’t filter down to the people answering your phones, Director,” Pepper replied with a dash of sarcasm that smacked of somebody who had been around Tony Stark for way too long. 

“ _Apparently not. Captain Rogers has been in South America since mid-December, with Agents Romanov and Barton, or I’m sure they would have tried to contact you. Hold on, and I’ll pass the numbers along.”_ Pepper pulled her StarkPad out of her bag and took numbers down while Fury pontificated about his staff needing some refresher courses on message etiquette. 

Pepper courteously took her leave, then turned to us. “I don’t believe for one minute that Tony told SHIELD to butt out,” she said, her tone sure.

“So, Fury’s lying, or mistaken?” I asked. 

“Guess we’ll find out if and when Pep gets a copy of the supposed message,” Rhodey put in. “Banner, any thoughts?”

Bruce shook his head. “I don’t know Nick much better than you guys. If he’s lying, Tony’ll hit the roof. Speaking of which—” he stood up—“the procedure should be about half done by my watch. I’m going to go check.”

Rhodey made a run to the main kitchen for sandwiches and drinks, and we talked quietly about unimportant things as we ate. Bruce returned in good humor and reported that Tony’s surgery was going as expected and with no problems. With a sigh of relief, Pepper finished her food and reached for her phone. “Bruce, feel free to chime in, since you’re part…of their team.” Her hesitation over the words echoed the hurt and anger that mingled in her eyes. She would, I knew for a fact, be much more openly irate on Tony’s behalf than he would ever be on his own.

After several rings, the voice of Captain America answered over a staticky connection. As usual, Pepper was the very picture of cool as she identified herself. “Hey, Steve,” Bruce added.

 _“Bruce, hi. You and Miss Potts keeping Stark out of trouble?”_

“Hey. I’ve been trying to get hold of you guys since before Christmas. Haven’t you gotten any of my emails?” Bruce chewed on his lower lip; confrontation of any kind didn’t suit him.

 _“No…?_ ” A questioning tone lifted the end of the word. _“I’m in…well, that’s classified, I guess. Clint and Natasha were here with me, but they left right after Christmas. I figured they had plans, or another assignment. Neither of them said anything about messages from you, though. What’s going on?”_

“Well, um, Tony and Colonel Rhodes got into a dustup with a terrorist leader, or well, they thought that’s who it was. Anyway, the upshot of it is, the guy came at him, Tony’s house in California is gone, and everybody thought he was dead for several days. I thought you guys might come to New York, or at least call, when you heard, and when you didn’t, I tried to reach you to let you know. Nobody at SHIELD would give me contact numbers for any of you.”

A sharp intake of breath replied. _“What in the—where is he? Is he okay?”_

“He’s fine,” Pepper hastened to interject. “He’s in surgery right now but it’s nothing to do with that.” 

_“Okay, okay. I, I had no idea. I’ve been in DC working with SHIELD, and since I don’t have any family, don’t really have a place, holidays aren’t important to me now. So when they asked me to go with Clint and Nat to chase down some old HYDRA artifacts in Argentina, I thought, why not. Oops. Miss Potts, I guess for your own safety you should pretend you didn’t hear that last part.”_

“Don’t worry, I knew. As of a few minutes ago, per Director Fury, I have the same security clearance level as Tony.” Pepper looked a tad amused. I zipped my lip, since I had no security clearance whatsoever. “If I’d known you had nobody to spend the holidays with, I would have asked Tony if we could invite you to come out to Malibu. Although in retrospect, that wouldn’t have turned out so well, given that everything got blown up. And too, Tony’s parents died around this time of year, so he’s—ambivalent at best about the season. Some years he goes all out, and some he doesn’t even want to acknowledge it.” 

_“I’m sorry to hear that. And I’m sorry I didn’t know this was going on. I don’t know why SHIELD wouldn’t have notified us, or tried to help Stark out.”_ Pepper, I noticed, didn’t raise the issue of the message Fury claimed to have received from Tony telling them to back off. “ _The Avengers definitely need a better system of staying in contact—I’ll take that up with Fury as soon as I get back stateside…_ ” Scuffs and scrapes could be heard from the other end along with some low grumbles. “ _Supposed to be some way to type notes on this fancy phone…well, whatever. Pencil and paper’s better, don’t need batteries for that. I’d also like to come to the tower and touch base with Stark, let him know how much I regret the breakdown in communication. It’d just be a day trip, I don’t have anywhere to stay in the city.”_

“You’re always welcome, Captain Rogers.” Pepper’s voice took on an edge. “With all due respect, though: if you don’t intend to ever use your floor in the tower, that’s your business. But after Tony went to the trouble of fitting it out for you, I think for the sake of common decency, the least you could do is tell him to his face that you don’t want it, even for an overnighter.”

 _“Ma’am?_ ” For all that I knew Steve Rogers was a native of Brooklyn, the puzzled utterance sounded downright Southern. _“I beg your pardon, I don’t understand what you mean.”_

With a perplexed pucker between her brows, Pepper explained about the redesign of the building, the emails Tony had sent inviting the whole team in, how he was even considering renaming it Avengers Tower. “It would certainly help that little communication problem if your team had a central base, and didn’t have to rely on SHIELD to carry messages. Tony doesn’t have any authority to direct you, of course, but he…had hoped you might appreciate, as you say, having a place.”

_“Ah…gosh. I didn’t…he’s fixed rooms up for all of us?”_

“More than rooms, Steve,” Bruce put in with a small grin. “You’ll like it.”

_“I…didn’t know. That’s very generous. SHIELD may still want me in DC for a while, and, honestly, they’ve offered to catch me up on the training that I missed when I was thrown into the war, and I’m gonna take them up on that. But…yes, I want to come see it, and thank Stark. I’ll make sure Clint and Nat know too. They didn’t say anything about it, so if I didn’t get the memo, neither did they.”_

Pepper thanked him and hung up, shaking her head. “Weird,” Rhodey pronounced.

“Very weird,” I agreed; but the mystery was tabled when Dr. Yu appeared with good news. The surgery was over, the synthetic bone implant had functioned exactly as intended, and Tony was in the recovery area.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy ponders missed communications, and talks with Rhodey. When she gets drafted to wrangle Tony after his surgery, they have a little heart-to-heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise!
> 
> I usually update mid-week and over the weekend, but I would really like to get my timeline caught up to canon before Endgame is released, so I may start posting new chapters more often. Part 4, working title Got A Little Air To Breathe, is about a third written, and everything through part 8, working title Fireblade, is sketched out pretty well. Although now that Marvel took my title for the ninth and final part of my epic, I need a new one. lol. (thinks hard, like Pooh)

After a break, we reassembled in the lounge on the med floor and settled in to wait until Tony was awake enough for visitors. At least, that was the idea. Every few minutes, though, one or more of our little band slipped off to go pester a nurse about how Tony was progressing and when we could see him.

I busied my brain with processing what I had learned from the phone conversations. Time-wise, it was just barely plausible that after he had left me with Happy, Tony could have called Fury to warn him off. All the other circumstances utterly contradicted it, however, chief among them being the simple, sad fact that Tony didn’t expect SHIELD or the Avengers to care about what happened to him. He had no reason to think they intended to come to his aid, so why would he bother to tell them not to?

The constant lack of communication among the team members and their supervisory staff was, if anything, even more alarming. I frankly didn’t want to contemplate how incompetent a governmental organization had to be to not give their superheroes their phone messages or safeguard their email. It was, as Rhodey had so succinctly put it, just plain weird. 

_That, or somebody’s lying_ , I mused. As annoying as I had found Steve Rogers in our first meeting, though, his shock and befuddlement at the information Pepper had imparted seemed genuine enough. Would Nick Fury lie to try and protect his agency from the blowback of sitting by while Tony nearly died? Possibly, though in our one meeting, he had professed real concern for Tony. Even the ass-coverage hypothesis couldn’t explain why he or anybody would block Bruce from contacting his fellow Avengers, or intercept Tony’s emails to the team. Maybe I was overthinking the situation, looking for a pattern where there was none. But, like I’ve said before, I don’t believe in coincidence.

I was still turning it over in my head when one of Dr. Yu’s nurses came to escort us back to the recovery pod. He explained that the doctor had authorized all four of us to go in for a few minutes, but then he wanted Tony, and us, to rest. That order specifically included Pepper, although she got a mutinous set to her jaw, and I decided to stay far away from that particular storm brewing.

As it turned out, Dr. Yu truly knew his stuff. Tony was still so loopy from the anesthetic when we were shown in that a few minutes’ visit was going to be about all he could handle. He slurred through some profanity, giggled a lot, and threatened to tell us about a college spring break in Mexico where Rhodey had been brutally surprised by a guy in a dress. An evil corner of my brain wished I’d had the video app enabled on my phone—not that I would have done anything with the incriminating footage, except show it to Tony, laugh when he turned beet red, and then let him watch me delete it.

Then Pepper pulled from her bag a small stuffed rabbit and set it on the table over the bed. Tony’s mouth flew open and bent into a huge goofy grin. “It’s just like your big one!” he crowed, picking it up and fiddling with its ears. “This one I’n’t nearly big enough t’ nap on though. That was th’ idea, y’know. You could’ve curled up in his lap, when I wasn’t home, and slept on him, somethin’ soft, t’make you think of me. I got the softest one, I sat on all of ’em, store clerk thought I was crazy, which I was, craaaazy f’r you…” I was on the opposite side of the room, out of Tony’s immediate line of sight, so it was safe for me to indulge a small strangled snicker as Pepper’s face got adorably pink. Rhodey matched it, and even Bruce smiled, until Tony suddenly looked up at her and caught his breath. “He’s gone though. Everything’s gone. Oh damn Pep, you were gone, I watched you fall, and I almost let go, because it was my fault an’ I wanted to fall too…” 

Tears suddenly spilled from his eyes, and I was in motion almost as soon as Pepper was, gathering the guys and shepherding them out of the room while she dropped onto the edge of the bed and folded to take her love carefully in her arms. “Drugs, man,” Rhodey said out in the hall, wiping a hand over his face; his cheeks looked suspiciously moist, and I felt less bad about the lump in my own throat. “We don’t say anything about this, right?”

“Right,” Bruce agreed.

“Absolutely,” I nodded. “Odds are he won’t remember it, and if he does, just don’t make a big thing of it.” 

Needless to say, the Hulk couldn’t have removed Pepper from Tony’s side after that, and no one even tried. After a while, I cautiously poked my head back in; they looked to both be asleep, curled around each other, so I shooed the boys off. Bruce headed for his floor, and Rhodey walked me back to mine. “So, you’re doing okay?” he asked.

“Yep. Looks like I’m total baseline human again. No need to tattoo a warning label on my butt.”

He chuckled. “You’d better keep a low profile for a while longer, though. Can’t be too careful. My superiors haven’t asked me about you again. Guess they assume I’m following directives.”

“Guess so. If it comes up, just tell ‘em the truth: I promised Pepper I’d help her wrangle Tony until he’s actually well enough to be turned loose on the unsuspecting public again.”

“Good luck with that,” Rhodey snorted.

“Tell me about it. And if they give you any shit about being here, don’t mention it to Tony. Or then again, do. He’d probably figure out a way to buy them out, right?” 

We laughed quietly together, then Rhodey sobered. “I’m so thankful you’re okay, baby girl. I…Maybe one of these days we can…”

“Maybe, yeah,” I said softly when his voice trailed off. “Or maybe we’re better as friends. Not saying ‘just’ friends, because there’s nothing lesser about that. It might change, down the road; but I’m not gonna stop pushing for the truth, and that makes you crazy. You’re not gonna stop trying to hold me back to protect me, and that makes _me_ crazy. Let’s stay in touch, and live our lives, and see where they take us.” Rhodey nodded, kissed my cheek and left, and I went to bed a little sad and a little grateful.

By morning, Tony was pretty much his normal self, which is to say, already griping that the nurses wouldn’t let him out of bed. JARVIS brought a lot of his work up to the medical suite, and then to the penthouse when Tony was cleared to move back into his own bed. According to the bit of online research I had done, replacement of the sternum normally took a couple months of recovery time; but with the new material Tony and Bruce had created, Dr. Yu was hopeful things would move along quicker.

Sure enough, eleven days later, the doctor and his team were on their way back to China and Tony was dividing his time between the lab with Bruce and his personal workshop in the basement of the tower, albeit sitting down as much as anybody could force him to. Bruce threatened to Hulk out and sit on him, which was a feat considering I had quickly figured out that Bruce rarely if ever joked about the ‘Other Guy’. Pepper threatened to strap him down, and anybody who knew Tony could have guessed the direction _that_ conversation would go (yep, straight into the gutter. I wanted to wash my ears out with soap afterwards). Since I was a frequent fixture around the lab and workshop anyhow, I volunteered to serve as assistant, lab rat, gofer, and whatever else, to keep him from trying to do shit he didn’t need to be doing yet. 

Actually, it worked out quite well. We sniped at each other constantly, except when Tony came out with something so outrageous I could only laugh. He seemed particularly satisfied with himself when he reduced me to that state. And we talked about everything under the sun. I told him crazy family stories, like the ones about my father’s eleven brothers and sisters, not counting the illegitimate half-sister none of them knew about until they were all grown (and then without batting an eye started inviting her to family reunions). Tony told his side of some of the college prank stories I had first heard from Rhodey when he and I first met.

Sometimes we talked about more. As much as Tony disliked medical pros in general, he never complained when the respiratory therapist came, and he usually watched with a small smile as the guy left. One day, I asked why. “I can breathe,” he said simply. “Yinsen had to take pieces of both my lungs out to get the original arc reactor in. The newer versions weren’t as bad, but it was like, the nightmares when you feel like something is sitting on your chest? I felt like that all the time. Sure, it’ll take a while for me to get used to not having it here, but, small price.” His hand spread over his chest, where I was accustomed to seeing the soft light of the device that had saved his life.

“Maybe that’s why—” Ulp. I verbally screeched to a halt, but not in time. Tony looked expectant, and a little suspicious, while I tried not to swallow my tongue, considering that I was the one about to spill the thing everybody else had managed to keep quiet. I cocked my head and tried to project an air of thought and revelation. “You were a little giddy when you came out from under anesthesia. It just occurred to me, maybe that was because your oxygen levels were higher than you’d gotten used to dealing with.”

One eyebrow went up. “Giddy.”

“Yeah, kinda silly one minute and a little maudlin the next. Not a big thing. It’s not like you spilled state secrets.”

“State secrets? Me? How would I know state secrets, I’m lucky Pepper tells me where she stashes her fancy fountain pens.” Tony studied me for a minute, then went on, “You thought I wouldn’t remember.”

“Remember what?” I tried to bluff, but when the other eyebrow went up, I knew my goose was cooked. 

“Me bawling like a drunk watching _Bambi_ , and spewing all my issues.”

“Oh, that. Please. Pep and Rhodey already know your issues, probably better than you do sometimes. Bruce has his own, of course, and I suspect it’d take more than yours to make him bat an eye. And me—” I intended to shrug and let it go, but once again, my mouth got the better of me. “You’re my friend, Tony, and it just hurts me when you blame yourself for everything that happens around you.” It surprised me when he took a step back, the skepticism in his face morphing into a wince. _What put that there?_ “If anybody else talked about you the way _you_ sometimes talk about you, I’d slap the taste out of their mouth. I know Pepper has suggested you talk with a therapist, and I wish you would too.”

His chin went out in a typically stubborn thrust. “I talk to you.”

“And I’m a good listener, even if I do say so myself, but I’m not a professional listener.”

He tried to stare me down, but this time those doe eyes were not going to beat me. After a long few beats, his shoulders sank a trifle. “I, uh, tried to talk to Bruce about things, but he fell asleep. In all fairness, he’d been up all night working on some bio-tech stuff, so once again, my epic bad timing. And, I dunno, his breathtaking anger management challenges make my shit look small, pardon the pun, by comparison. I probably bored him.”

“Hardly. You have a very soothing voice. If anything, it’s more likely you lulled him to sleep.” Tony looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to be appalled or flattered by that, and I pressed the small advantage I gained by his moment of indecision. “Bruce isn’t a professional listener either, though. Therapists are, and they’re trained to teach you how to help yourself. You already know the basic skills I taught you for anxiety attacks; they can train you to use them more effectively. And you can get them to help with that thing we talked about New Year’s Eve, that whole believing in yourself thing.” When his nose wrinkled in distaste I added, “Don’t make me start singing show tunes. I don’t have a great voice, but I know a song from The Wiz that would slot right into this point in the conversation.”

“Show tunes?” Tony scoffed. “You forget, I grew up just a few subway stops from Broadway. I’ve forgotten more show tunes—on purpose—than most people will ever know. Maybe I should commission somebody to write a musical version of the Tony Stark saga. That guy who wrote In the Heights is good. Sharp songs, couple of smokin’ hot starlets to play you and Pep, somebody taller to play me…” He punctuated the snark by hopping up from his chair and doing a couple of surprisingly decent tap-dance steps.

“Easy there, Astaire,” I cautioned, but in a good-humored way, not scolding. “I know a good therapist back in Cali, and she knows folks here. I can get her to recc somebody. They won’t tell anybody anything unless you explicitly approve it. HIPAA and all, you know. If y’all decide you could use medication to get the attacks stable, or maybe get them gone altogether, you can do that. My mom’s doc found the right med, and with that and several therapy sessions, she was good. Might take more than several sessions ; everybody’s different, but that’s up to you and them. I guarantee they won’t doze off on you. They won’t tell you what to do, but they will listen, and give you ideas and tools.”

He stilled, and met my gaze with his. “Tools are good,” he offered. “And…yeah, somebody listening while I blab, that’d be good too. That’d be nice.”

I smiled and moved toward him, angling to reach around his shoulders for the usual side-hug I gave him. instead, he pulled me around and I ended up pressed fully to his front. “Tony! You had chest surgery just a few weeks ago, remember?”

“I heal fast,” he countered. “Always have. Broke my arm when I was seven, got the cast off in two weeks. Always will, probably.” 

“Hope so, considering the way you constantly fling yourself into harm’s way.”

“Aw, you really do care. And here I thought you were just conditioning me to tolerate your grabby hands for your own perverse pleasure.” Despite that dig, he wasn’t exactly wrestling to get out of the hug that he, after all, started. I was pleased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know that in IM3, we get the impression Tony is telling Bruce the whole story because he has not seen him at all. I acknowledge Marvel made that decision, but given that it is in my opinion a dumbass decision I’ve elected to ignore it. :)
> 
> The song Chrissy threatens to sing is Believe, from The Wiz. Here's a good version, from the recent live tv production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Almu15ItY
> 
> Even in canon, Tony definitely grew up around Broadway music...I forgot until I heard it the other day, but the song Maria is playing in the flashback in Civil War, Try to Remember, is from a classic musical of the 1960s, The Fantasticks! (and he has good taste this chapter in choosing somebody to write the musical of his life story...y'all do know who wrote In the Heights, don't you? hehe)
> 
> I could not resist putting these references in, because a few weeks ago I woke from an amazingly detailed dream about a stage musical version of IM1...one of these days, maybe I'll write some bits of it up.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After taking a meeting at Vanity Fair, Chrissy finds herself at a crossroads, and turns to Pepper and Tony for advice.

With Tony back at full throttle (heading out to the West Coast to pick up his bots after their rescue and refurbishment), my promise to Pepper kept, and my body pronounced clear of Extremis, it was high time I got back to my own work. Strangely enough, that was harder than it sounded. Free at last to move around, I explored the area around the tower, enjoying the delis and coffee shops and bodegas of midtown Manhattan as though I was a new transplant, rather than a semi-tourist about to leave. I fully enjoyed my floor of the tower too, relishing the work space and the lighting and the view and that glorious kitchen, even knowing it would soon be somebody else’s floor, or maybe precisely because of that.

Pepper insisted she and Tony wanted me to stay as long as I liked, but I felt certain I was close to overstaying my welcome. I focused on thoughts of my tiny apartment in California, the balmy western breezes, the jetting around to chase down scoops, and tried not to think about becoming lonely or jaded or pressured to write what my bosses wanted instead of what my heart dictated. 

For their part, Tony and Pepper both seemed to be settling in. Happy was released from his doctors’ care, relocated to the East Coast, and returned to his duties with his usual semi-cheerful demeanor. Pepper and I left him aghast when we told him everything he had missed (well, almost everything). As far as catching people up, Pepper also briefed Tony on her conversations with Fury and Steve Rogers. Thus, nobody fell over in shock the day Captain America showed up in the lobby of Stark Tower, in khakis and a neat dress shirt, charming Cindy the receptionist and drawing attention from all the shops on the ground floor.

I happened to be in one of those shops that midday, treating myself to my favorite grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. I kept my head down until Tony tromped down in his shop uniform of ripped jeans and grease-stained t-shirt and rescued Rogers, who, if the flush of his cheeks was any indication, seemed weirdly uncomfortable with all the attention.

It was, I decided with some sadness, past time I headed back across country. If the Avengers were starting to move into Tony’s tower, I needed to move out. Rooming with superheroes was most certainly not the low profile Rhodey had counseled. Still, I delayed, considering how to tell Pepper and Tony and not hurt their feelings, and convey how very much I cared for and appreciated them. I resolved to cook supper for them one more time and tell them then.

And then, I checked my in box and found two relevant messages among the wad of spam and sale emails. From the back of my closet, I pulled out a skirt suit I hadn’t needed in a while, armored up, and took the subway several stops down Manhattan Island to the offices of Vanity Fair. The meeting itself didn’t take long, and the words I heard weren’t all that surprising.

Afterwards, I didn’t want to go straight back to the tower, although I supposed it was the best option—the only option, really, at the moment. Instead, I rode up and down, walked the length of Wall Street, poked aimlessly through the Fountain Pen Hospital (I could get Pepper something nice from there next Christmas, if I had work by then), and wandered through Trinity Church Cemetery (Rhodey liked history, and I wondered if he had ever come here and seen Alexander Hamilton’s grave). I roamed the Lower East Side, on vague memories of Tony mentioning his dad had grown up there; I ate a corned beef sandwich at the legendary Katz’s deli, its walls plastered with pictures of long-gone stage actors and Yiddish comedians, and people-watched out the front windows. 

By the time I browsed idly through a few shops, my brain had caught up with events, and I began to plan my next move. When I had the framework of an idea mentally duct-taped together, I got back on the subway and rode uptown. I have a good sense of direction, and it only took a couple of wrong turns before I located the palatial townhouse that had been Tony’s childhood home.

I had texted ahead, so Pepper opened the door before I reached the top of the steps. She wore much-loved jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair tied back in a scarf. “Hey, gal,” I greeted her. “Sorry I’m not dressed to help you clean.”

“Oh, it’s fine. Tony’s been paying a service to come in and keep the place up. He’s just going through the last of his parents’ things before we put the house on the market. You’d think he would’ve done it years ago, but…I guess there are still a lot of memories, some good ones even. With us moving back here, he felt like it was finally time to let it go.” I walked in with her and whistled at the opulent entranceway and staircase. “You look like you’re dressed for business. Did you snag a big interview?” 

“No, although I’ll be interviewing, soon. Vanity Fair’s letting me go.” 

Pepper gasped and led me to a seat on a sofa, lavish upholstery peeking out from beneath the sheet draped over it. “Why? You’ve been great for them. Just the stories you’ve written about Tony for them should make you indispensable.”

“Nobody’s indispensable, Pep. They won’t publish the article I wrote on the Mandarin case, not without my essentially trashing it and starting over from scratch, and I refuse to do that. I’d heard stuff online, about Killian and his whole plot to subvert the Vice-President being backed by the real Mandarin, but I figured it was just conspiracists assembling themselves a Grand Unified Theory of all things. Well, it’s not. Apparently the Pentagon has put that idea out there, and the mainstream media is afraid to contradict it. An article to the contrary, written by somebody who was there, namely me, and puts the blame for the whole mess squarely on the white guy, is…inconvenient, and unwelcome.” I sighed. “I know Rhodey wants me to lay low and keep the higher-ups’ attention off me, and consequently off you too. But this is insane. People have a right to know that innocent folks were dying because of a rogue domestic terrorist, not a foreign organization. I’d post my article online, but, that whole laying low thing.

“They tried to make the excuses they’ve disciplined me for before: I’m too close to the story, I’ve lost my objectivity, and I hate hearing that, because I’ve fought so hard to keep that. I understand spin, but I was watching people while I ate earlier, and I just can’t support letting them go around blinded to facts. Not being ‘objective’ is okay, when what you’re favoring is the truth.”

“You told Killian that too. I remember.” Pepper took my hand. “I’m sorry they’re doing this to you, Chrissy. In a way, though, maybe it’s a positive. They haven’t treated you right in a long time, at least in my opinion—although I can’t exactly be objective! You know I’ve always got your back. You can do better, a lot better.”

“I hope so,” I smiled at my friend in gratitude, then winced when a crash sounded beneath our feet. 

Pepper made an expressive face. “Tony’s down there going through his dad’s ‘vault’. I just hope he manages not to blow the place up before we can sell it.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I chuckled. “Anyway, New York is probably the best place in the world to be a writer; there are lots of opportunities, if I can hit the right one. That’s gonna be a challenge, when what I want is to call things what they are, to say what I know in my heart is right. I think I told you one time, what I think about journalism: a good journalist loves the truth, pursues it, and wants to reveal it and persuade others to see it.” 

“Agreed,” Pepper said with a firm nod. “I admit, I’m selfish enough to want you to stay. It’s…I don’t know how I would have gotten through these past weeks without you here. Tony loves me, I know that, and he wants to support me, but having a girlfriend, a sister, it’s a different thing.”

“I know. Just the times we hang out, drink coffee, make fun of stupid tv shows—the time we spent half a day wandering around that crazy Japanese toy store in Soho—and, well, I love my independence, but I’ve been realizing lately how much I missed connections. Now that I’ve gotten it back, I want to stay close enough to keep that, Pep.”

With a little grin, Pepper said, “Well, I have an idea—”

“Whoa!” Tony yelled as he carried in a stack of file folders and notebooks and dropped them with a thump in a swaddled chair near the marble hearth. “No ideas, Potts. DUM-E is back at the tower with his fire extinguisher, and if he’s not here to do his duty, you are not allowed to have ideas.”

“Pot, meet kettle,” she retorted with a smile. He untied a long-sleeved t-shirt from around his waist, tossed it over the far arm of the sofa and flopped down beside her, ignoring the grime on his sweat pants and tank top. “You’re a mess.”

“You love it,” he returned.

I cocked my head, enjoying their bickering, and tried not to think how this might be the last time I got to enjoy it in such a homey way. “Huh," I observed impishly. "Pep, he’s gonna look good when he gets older. Look at all that dust in his hair; he’s all grey, and he’s still fine.”

“I’m still not sharing,” she fired back.

“I’m still not asking,” I countered. “Mark my words, though. Silver fox, one of these days. Just sayin’. Hey, the fact that I don’t want him like that doesn’t prevent me from appreciating the view.”

We both eyed him appraisingly. He looked torn between squirming and preening. “You two are a menace,” he muttered finally. “Right out of some heist film. The corporate raider and her hired muscle, about to seduce and/or savage the hell out of this poor innocent hard-working small businessman.” Pepper shouted with laughter, and I nearly rolled off the sofa giggling. “What? Whole truth, nothing but. Chrissy looks like a Wall Street wolf.”

“Would that I had that kind of green,” I sighed, sobering. “I’m unemployed, as of today.” I quickly summarized what I had already told Pepper. Surprisingly, Tony listened in silence and with remarkable attention.

“Good,” he said crisply when I finished. “Not good that you don’t have a job, but good that you don’t have a job there. They don’t deserve you. So, what’s next? I know your brain is always clicking. You got plans? Back to California, back to Tennessee, what?”

“Definitely not going back to Tennessee. Maaaaybe back to California? I don’t know. I like it there, but it’s not like I have ties. The best friends I made there are here, now.” I spread my hands toward Tony and Pepper. “And with no confirmed employment there, there’s really nothing to hold me on the West Coast. I was just telling Pepper I like it here a lot more than I expected to, and there should be a lot of prospects for a writer. I know I need to move out of the tower, so I can hunt up a little crib in an outer borough, close to a subway stop, that I can afford until I get a steady flow of income again. I could get Simon, my ex, to put out some feelers for postings overseas, but I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m starting to like the idea of settling in one spot. It’s not like I have to keep writing—I mean, I’m never going to stop. Hell, I’d write fanfic for fun if nothing else, my brain has to have that creative outlet; but as far as earning a living, I could, I dunno, be a personal chef or some such shit as that. Or, I got approached a while back by a TV station about taking an anchor job—”

Tony made a dismissive noise. “Waste of your mad skills.”

“Pay’s good, though.”

“Nick Fury asked about you the other day.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh, cliffhanger...hehe.
> 
> Almost done! One more chapter, hopefully up on Monday as a Christmas gift.
> 
> Wordsmith part 4, Got A Little Air To Breathe, will start posting the latter part of next week. I'm shooting for 3 chapters a week from now on, because I really, really want to get caught up to canon time before Endgame comes out.
> 
> I like to picture the Stark house in NYC as looking kind of like this:   
> https://www.6sqft.com/bookworms-rejoice-upper-east-side-mansion-boasts-palatial-double-height-library/
> 
> Comments coveted, as always! :)


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrissy weighs her options, learns the surprising truth behind her apartment, and plans a negotiation.

My mind made that noise like a needle screeching across a record. “Do what?” Pepper made a small noise of shock, and my hand went out toward hers automatically. “Fury asked about—me? Is it Extremis? Does he know?”

“No, no. He’d have to have a damn crystal ball, although with him, who knows. Maybe he sees all things in the shiny reflection of his head in a mirror. But actually, it sounds like you made quite an impression on him, of some kind, when you met in Malibu?” Tony hiked a quizzical eyebrow. “I missed that scene in the movie, somehow.”

“Oh, um, yeah. I never told you about that, did I. Sorry, I wasn’t concealing, just didn’t think about it. Then when I was here, I told the other Avengers, but you & Pep were catching up, so I guess you didn’t hear. I just—I was going to your house to check on you, back when you were sick, and he and some of his people had blocked the road. I wasn’t happy about it, and I let him know in no uncertain terms. He said you were working on a life or death project—for SHIELD, obviously, though I didn’t know that then—and he promised me somebody would be there for you.” 

“Agent Agent,” he nodded. It meant nothing to me, but Pepper’s eyes dropped, and I recalled her mention of a SHIELD liaison who had become friends with her and Tony, and had died in the Chitauri invasion. “That would explain his description of you as a ‘sassy poetry-spoutin’ little spitfire’.” _So, Fury considers Dolly a poet. Good to know._ “Then that article you wrote about, um—” 

He waved his hands around in the general direction of the room’s windows, and he did that little sniff that said he was tensing up. I didn’t need more clues to what he meant. “He read it?” I jumped in, before Tony felt pressured to say any more about the alien encounter that had so wounded his psyche. 

“Read all of your Vanity Fair pieces, or so he implied.”

“And? What’d he say?”

Tony sat up straight, puffed out his chest, covered his left eye with one hand, and dropped his voice to a low rumble. “’Noteworthy, Stark. Damn good work that gal does’. And then, wonders never cease, he asked my opinion of you.” 

“Oh Lord.” I braced myself. “Dare I ask?”

“Told him the facts. You love science, you love the truth, you have a particular gift for distilling complex matters into a form the average sixth grader can understand, without losing the plot or making the sixth grader feel like you’re talking down to ‘em.” He paused, and his eyes locked with mine, betraying a depth of honesty that was startling. “I also told him you’re one of the few people I would trust with everything I had. And I told him the Avengers need you.” Heedless of the way my eyes bugged out, he carried on, “Superheroes are good at kicking bad guys’ asses, but not so much at public relations. Unless Fury wants me to stagger from blasting weird alien sloth-things to letting idiot reporters have an earful in my usual highly inappropriate way, he needs a good wordsmith in his corner, somebody talented and trustworthy. In short, you.”

My momentary brain-freeze was broken by Pepper’s angry little yell. “Tony Stark! I was just about to offer her a position with SI. Are you seriously going to challenge _your own company_ for a hire?”

The habitual glint of mischief sparked in Tony’s eyes as he side-eyed her. “So it would appear, madame CEO.” He leaned over and shook his head vigorously, releasing a cloudlet of dust from his hair that made her screech and smack him. 

“Children,” I sighed. “My best friends are both children. Pepper, I’d love to work for SI, but you’ve got Leticia and she’s awesome and she’s got her team whipped into shape, and I don’t know that there would be a permanent place there for me that everybody would be comfortable with. Tony, I—I thought you were kidding when you said back in Florida that the Avengers would hire me.”

“Nope!” he said brightly. “Fury hadn’t cornered me then; it was just my own brilliance finding the gaps in his setup. If he’s stupid enough not to take you, though, and to be clear he hasn’t said, but he sounded open to the possibility, SI will snap you up in a heartbeat. You think some yokel TV station pays well? Wait till you get a load of me.”

“So now the company is getting the Avengers’ leftovers?” Pepper challenged him, but with a playful twinkle in her own eye. They fell to bickering again, but it lost some of its snap when they were staring at each other the whole time like they wished they were in a, shall we say, more private setting.

“Lord, hear my prayer and never EVER let me come between those two,” I said fervently. My mind was abuzz, comparing the avenues suddenly opened to me. “So, Tony, do I need to contact him, tell him you’ve tendered an offer, or what?”

“Nah, if you’re interested I’ll pass it along to him. I can’t tender anything. I’m just a consultant, not part of the super-secret boy band which isn’t so secret anymore. No authorization to do anything in the name of the Avengers Initiative.”

That…griped my cookies, in a big way. Who in hell could call someone a mere consultant, when he saved the lives of millions of people, and very nearly gave up his own to do it? I reined myself in, would not say that, for fear of throwing Tony into an anxiety attack. “Pep has mentioned that consultant thing,” I said, inwardly pleased with myself for the calm timber of my tone. “Exactly what does it mean?”

Tony did his usual blowing-shit-off hand wave. “They decided I was too unstable and just wanted my brain on call. When shit hit the fan, I guess they got sufficiently desperate they’d take whatever help they could get, even the obsessive-compulsive, self-destructive, textbook narcissistic billionaire.”

Thankful for the yoga sessions I had joined Bruce in, I took several long breaths to contain my silent rage. On the last breath, I got an idea. “I’d like very much to talk to Director Fury, if he’s willing,” I said coolly. 

A flick of my eyes to one side showed Pepper was almost vibrating with the effort to hold her emotions in check. Tony looked from me to her. “All right!” he said suddenly with a clap of his hands and sprang up from his seat. “Got that settled then. Good talk, everybody.” He scooped up the pile of stuff he’d brought upstairs, grumbling about how it’d all end up in a corner down in the tower basement anyway, until he had the time and disposition to wade through it. “You riding back with us?” he asked me.

“Sure. I guess it’s okay for me to stay at the tower for now? Unless you need the space—”

“If you keep pretending to be that dense, Fury won’t let you sit down in his office,” Tony cut me off.

“When we said ‘your floor’,” Pepper added, “that’s what we meant. Tony and I have been hoping for a while we could persuade you away from that magazine—although you were _supposed_ to be working for SI,” she interjected with a sharp, though amused, look in Tony’s direction, “so when we rebuilt the tower, we designed that space with you in mind.”

“You couldn’t possibly be thick enough to think it was an accident that your kitchen looks exactly like the one in Malibu did,” Tony chimed in. “It's just the way you liked it, plenty of room for all those damn spices of yours, and JARVIS to help you cook.”

“Um.” Maybe I actually was that dense. “Oh. OH.” They wanted me to stay. Had wanted me to stay for a while. Had drawn out a floor plan just for me, just the way they had for Bruce, and Captain freaking America, and a bunch of other superheroes. “I…don’t know what to say. Other than yes, and thank you, and you’re still the best friends ever.”

I hugged Pepper, but Tony high-tailed it out the door. “Arms are full!” he yelled over his shoulder on his way to their ride. “And I’m a mess, remember. You don’t want to put arms on me!”

“Argh. I’ll catch him, later.” I mock-groaned.

Pepper regarded me with a steady look. “Don’t blow your top at Fury. And don’t deny you were angry just then. I could tell.”

“Pot, meet kettle,” I echoed back at her. “I’m fine. I have an idea, actually. If Fury gives me flack about it, I’ll only agree to work with the Avengers as a _consultant_ , and take your offer to help Leticia at SI. But it’s something I’ll need to talk with him about, to present it face to face.”

She considered me for a long moment, then nodded, and we headed for the car. I slid into the back seat and steadied Tony’s unbalanced piles of files with a hand. “Don’t look,” he cautioned with tongue in cheek as he navigated the Manhattan traffic. “Secret Squirrel tier stuff there. Your eyeballs’d melt.”

“No doubt,” I assented, sat back and turned over the idea, the wonderful awful idea I had had. It might get me kicked out of SHIELD’s headquarters—lair, bunker, whatever—on my ass, but it was worth a try. If I pulled it off, it would be the biggest score of my career; hell, of my life. The irony was, I would never write about it, and I was more than content with that. 

_A good reporter reveals the truth, and persuades others to see it._ if Nick Fury wanted somebody to speak the truth to him, that was exactly what he was going to get, whether he could handle it or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here we are at the end of Wordsmith part 3! Thanks again to all y'all who have read, left kudos, commented, and shared ideas. I love every last one of you!
> 
> Part 4, Got A Little Air To Breathe, picks up about a week later, on the evening before Chrissy's job interview with SHIELD. ETA, chapter 1 is up! y'all follow that arrow that says Next Work, and go check it out!
> 
> Happy holidays to all!


End file.
